All Things Digital

Was it only a week ago that we wrote a post about the sale prospects of Business.com and did a video interview with its CEO Jake Winebaum at its Santa Monica, Calif., offices?

As it turned out–and I cannot say I was surprised–the deal was finally struck this past week for the highly targeted search-and-directory site to be sold to R.H. Donnelley (RHD) for $345 million.

“Donnelley has 2,000 sales people on the street and more than 600,000 advertisers and people come to them, so they make a great fit for us,” said Winebaum to me in an interview last night. “And we have a pay-for-performance platform that is hard to build, so we make a great fit for them, too.”

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I paid a visit to the Santa Monica, Calif., offices of Business.com recently to check in with its CEO, Jake Winebaum.

Back in the day, I covered Winebaum closely, first during his stint as the go-to Internet guy at Disney and after he left there to strike out on his own with serial entrepreneur Sky Dayton. It was all very glamorous then.

But some of what they attempted, especially an “incubator” to build Internet start-ups from the ground up called eCompanies, did not work out as the hype swirling around it then promised.

Nonetheless, you only need a few hits to cover up all the misses, and it looks like Winebaum might have one soon, after toiling in relative obscurity since then in the less-exciting business-to-business space.

Business.com, which is essentially a highly targeted search-and-directory site, is being looked at by several companies, including Dow Jones (owner of this site, too), as well as News Corp. (likely for its new business cable channel) and the New York Times Company.

The price? A cool $300 million to $400 million.

That’s a lot, of course, and a sweet price being bandied about, especially since both Winebaum and Dayton were widely mocked–including by me–for paying $7.5 million for the domain name in 1999.

Now that it looks like News Corp. might be buying Dow Jones, it is not clear where the deal to sell will land, but here’s a video of Winebaum talking about the site:

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