Business.com, the B2B search engine & directory, is up for sale and according to the Wall Street Journal, the web destination hopes to attract valuation between $300 and $400 million via an auction managed by Credit Suisse.
Dow Jones and the New York Times (which owns About.com) may be interested buyers in the major business directory which initially purchased its domain name for $7.5 million in 1999.
Business.com uses a multi-tiered revenue generation method (which is probably the highest profile arbitrage site on the planet) with an even mix of paid business directory listings (sold in-house), paid search advertising (provided by Google), and contextual ads (externally driven).
Essentially, the search engine, could be the dream acquisition of many publishers, since its focus is on the business world, and businesses understand the importance of paying for search traffic and authority links now more than ever before.
