Yellow pages publisher buys Business.com; forests rejoice
Barry Diller’s IAC sniffed around. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bailed after the bidding passed $300 million. Dow Jones had its hands full dealing with Murdoch’s takeover bid. The New York Times stayed in till the end. But when the gavel came down, it was R.H. Donnelley, the yellow pages and local search firm, that walked away with Business.com, paying $345 million for the business information, directory and search site.
In the end, the deal had little to do with the domain name and its storied history (see “Buy the business.com domain and we’ll throw in this profitable company for free“), and everything to do with, well, business. Donnelley racked up $442 million in 2006 operating income publishing directories in 28 states under the AT&T, Dex and Embarq names, among others. But it didn’t take a Bill Gates prediction (”Yellow Page usage amongst people in their, say, below 50, will drop to zero, near zero over the next five years.”) for the company to know that dropping 600-page books of ever-changing data on doorsteps periodically was not the way of the future. Donnelly already has an online presence with sites like DexKnows, but adding Business.com will give it a profitable business-to-business site, an expanded audience and some new technology.
I think that the handwriting is on the wall for newspapers and magazines as well. I would predict that by 2025, the only place you will be able to see a rotary printing press is in an industrial museum. Books in print may last much longer, but some catagories there may fade as well, textbooks for instance, at least in fields where things change often.