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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Yesterday, it was his talented eyebrows, and today, John Paczkowski’s very lustrous hair gets a workout in his Digital Daily video.

Using Selsun Blue, John washes away all pretense that Lonelygirl15 is anything more than a marketing shill with a recent deal with Neutrogena. Here is a direct link to today’s video, which is also below (don’t judge us for our promiscuous link-love here at AllThingsD.com).

Here is his text post about it in his Digital Daily column.

He also posts here about Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg’s latest boneheaded remark about the benefits to his company of the Apple iPhone rollout in a week, especially given that the carrier is not selling them. (Seidenberg also made another gooney remark about BlueTooth technology at the D conference a few years back that you can see here in a video).

And John chronicles the sweet revenge of entrepreneur Sky Dayton here, who was pilloried for buying the business.com domain for $7.5 million in the midst of the dot-com bubble–it is now for sale for $300 million to $400 million.

I always pay attention when anyone calls a media executive smart and, when it is a newly minted one, I pay particular attention. In a post today, BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis points to a story in The Wall Street Journal also today about CBS’s renewed efforts to plunge into the digital space under the leadership of Quincy Smith, its new Web guru whom I have known since he was doing investor relations for Netscape back in the day.

While he was impossibly young then, looking like a 12-year-old except for the sideburns, Smith is still the same jumping bean of a person he always has been, all frenetic energy and rat-a-tat-tat patter.

The Journal piece discusses Smith’s strategy of placing bets all over the Web by putting CBS content just about everywhere, across a wide range of sites. “CSI” on MSN! “CSI” on Bebo! “CSI” on AOL! “CSI” in your glove compartment! (It could happen.)

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