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.”

There were many others in the bidding, including the New York Times, IAC and Dow Jones (owner of this site), which were all outbid by the yellow- and white-pages giant.

A sale has long been rumored (a rumor broken in The Wall Street Journal, in fact), but Donnelley–though an obvious bidder in hindsight–was never mentioned among the suitors.

The company makes and distributes paper and online directories under the AT&T, Dex and Embarq names in more than two dozen states.

The final news of the deal was first reported by paidContent here on Wednesday.

Winebaum, a former Disney online exec, will likely get a handsome payout in the buyout, in the cash-plus-performance deal, and will become the president of RHD’s interactive unit.

It will now include a new RHD local search site called DexKnows.com, and its LocalLaunch search-engine marketing service, as well as Business.com’s units.

It is all a sweet result for Winebaum especially since both he and Business.com investor and entrepreneur Sky Dayton were widely mocked–including by me–for paying $7.5 million for the domain name in 1999.

In its first incarnation as a business portal, with lots of content, it almost went belly up, but Winebaum refocused it as a search service for business–and gave it the most dull, but useful, interface you might find out there.

In essence, it links buyers of various business goods and services with merchants and those merchants pay for the links.

Another interesting part of the business is its related Work.com site, which solicits and vets content about various business issues from users (often consultants looking for business) and posts them.

Winebaum said RHD was very interested in using the platform to create things like local neighborhood guides online.

Business.com is very small in comparison to RHD, which had operating income of $442 million last year. Helped by another $10 million round of investment a few years ago, Business.com had about $15 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

But having a strong foothold online is increasingly important to print-dependent outfits like RHD, although Winebaum insisted that the form of distribution did not matter, as long as all bases were covered.

“I want Business.com to be a long-term success,” said Winebaum, who said he planned to stay and build on Business.com’s success. “And the future is about providing leads for merchants and the right information for those seeking help, so whether they come from print or the Internet does not matter–you just have to be where people go to for information.”

I am reposting the video interview with Winebaum below, as it gives good insight into the business of Business.com:

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:

In its first incarnation as a business portal, with lots of content, it almost went belly up, but Winebaum refocused it as a search service for business–and gave it the most dull, but useful, interface you might find out there. In essence, it links buyers of various business goods and services with merchants.

Another interesting part of the business is its related Work.com site, which solicits and vets content about various business issues from users (often consultants looking for business) and posts them.

“I found we were spending 80% of our money on the part of the business that brought in 20% of the revenues,” said Winebaum, speaking of Business.com’s first efforts at heavy original editorial content, which resulted in major losses. “And when it was clear that the search and directory was exactly the opposite, it was obvious what we had to do.”

Since then, helped by another $10 million round of investment a few years ago, the business has been throwing off cash, about $15 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

Perhaps not as glamorous as working for the Mouse, but not bad.

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.

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.)

This approach of Internet promiscuity is in contrast to other big media companies, many of which think they need to build and control their own video and content portals. (CBS CEO Les Moonves, by the way, will be onstage at the D conference in a couple of weeks.)

Jarvis likes Smith’s looseness, as I do (and always have), even though Valleywag recently and amusingly compared Smith to a “charming cad who makes every girl thinks she’s The One” in a recent post. Money quote from Jarvis (although he has to explain better the inside/outside thing to us thickheaded old-media types):

Why not encourage your audience to recommend and distribute your good stuff. It’s free marketing. It’s the endorsement that matters most. It’s only wise. But media has always been about control, about selling scarcity. So it’s damned hard for these guys to shift their mental map of the world and realize that they are not at center, we are. What they defined as inside is outside. This requires them to turn their world inside out. CBS is doing that.”

San Francisco’s controller’s office gave the thumbs up last week to a plan for EarthLink and Google to blanket the city with free wireless access, which moves the proposal another step closer to reality.

I interviewed the city’s Mayor Gavin Newsom, along with EarthLink founder Sky Dayton onstage at D last year (you can see pictures and video about the session here under “Wireless Panel”) about the effort, which is controversial here (and elsewhere) as costly and problematic, even as cities have been aggressively pushing such measures.

And so are tiny states. According to a story last week in the Burlington Free Press, Vermont and Rhode Island are vying to be the “first state to have border-to-border high-speed Internet.” While big states like Texas would have a hard time wiring their vast expanses, smaller is better for weensy states and some not-so-small ones, like Kentucky and South Carolina.

The competitive Vermont’s House and Senate just gave final approval this weekend to a bill to make it the first “e-state,” throwing in statewide cell coverage along with the broadband by 2010, using both public and private delivery methods.

Finally, in yet another link to the super-friendly Smith, the San Jose Mercury News picks five “hot” venture capitalists under 40 years old in a story last week. Thankfully, hot refers to their record, and included in the group is London-based Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, who has been involved in sexy (because of piles of money involved) companies like Tellme and Skype.

And, now, with CBS’s Smith and others, a recent $45 million investment in Joost, the online video service (from the founders of Skype, in fact) that I wrote a post about last week. Rimer, whom I met when he was an Internet analyst at Hambrecht & Quist, also worked hand-in-glove with Smith as a VC at the Barksdale Group, which closed at the end of the last bubble popping.

Other “hot” VCs under 40, by the way, are: Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel; Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital; Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy; and, of course, the ubiquitous Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital.

Please see this disclosure related to me and CBS.