Dun & Bradstreet describes itself as a “source of commercial information and insight on businesses.” The inclusive-sounding AllBusiness.com should be a good match for it, then, and might well be worth the $55 million D&B paid.
After all, in late July, Business.com sold for $350 million, and onlookers felt that was due mostly to its domain name. In the case of AllBusiness.com, the same factor will be at work. Kathy Yates, the CEO of Allbusiness.com, also pointed out, “[T]his acquisition creates one of the largest audiences of intent-driven business decision makers on the Web.”
Investors certainly seem to approve of the arrangement; D&B’s stock has been climbing since mid-November, and the newly-announced acquisition didn’t put an end to that trend. D&B’s current market cap is $5.22 billion, so $55 million won’t exactly endanger the corporation in any event.
As for concerns about a bubble – $55 million is still a fair amount of money – Duncan Riley stated, “The original company was acquired by NBCi in March of 2000 for $225 million and was merged later that year with BigVine.com in a business known as AllBusiness. . . . If anything its evidence that there’s not a bubble, valuations now are much more sensible then during Web 1.0.”
