Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Facebook paid $8.5 million to acquire the domain name 'fb.com'.

How much money did Facebook fork over when it acquired Fb.com last year? A cool $8.5 million, more than 42 times the amount the company originally paid for Facebook.com.

In case you were wondering, the previous holder of the domain wasn't an incredibly shrewd domain squatter. It was actually held for a long time by the American Farm Bureau Federation, who owned fb.com to redirect to their actual website, fb.org. Facebook acquired the domain sometime last year from the American Farm Bureau Federation. At its annual meeting in Atlanta, the non-profit revealed that it earned $8.5 million on the sale of fb.com, according to Reuters.

The last high-profile domain purchase by Facebook was for Facebook.com, all the way back when it was known as TheFacebook. The company paid $200,000 in August 2005 to acquire the domain, 42.5 times less than what Facebook spent to acquire fb.com. While the Facebook.com purchase was expensive for the company back then, it’s an investment that has clearly paid off. The company is obviously hoping that fb.com will also pay off.

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