• Facebook Paid $8.5 Million for the Exclusive Fb.com Domain

    When Facebook revealed its revamped messaging feature, complete with email functionality, it also enabled any Facebook user to get an @facebook.com email address. The problem was this had previously been used internally for employees.

    Facebook solution was to acquire fb.com to be used internally from then on. As you can expect, a two-letter domain name doesn't come cheap, but Facebook didn't reveal what it paid for it at the time.

    Fb.com used to belong to the American Farm Bureau which has now revealed at its annual meeting that it made $8.5 million from the sale of a couple of domain names.

    While the organization would not name the buyer of the domains, it's not hard to put two and two together.

    $8.5 million may not sound like much for a company valued at $50 billion and raising $2 billion in funding with another $2 billion in annual revenue.

    But, as far as domain name sales go, the sum is a tidy one, roughly half the current record holder.

    What's interesting is that fb.com ended up costing the company a whole lot more than facebook.com, which it also had to acquire after the social network had already spread quite a bit.

    At first, the social network was dubbed The Facebook and had the appropriate domain name, thefacebook.com. It got rid of the preceeding "the" early on, apparently at Sean Parker's suggestion, but the facebook.com domain name was already taken.

    Back in 2005, the company paid $200,000 for its current domain name, a steal compared to what it had to shell out for fb.com.

    Facebook employees now get to enjoy an exclusive @fb.com email address, while the 500 million or so Facebook users get to use the shiny new @facebook.com.

    Source: Softpedia
    Comments 2 Comments
    1. darkmawl's Avatar
      darkmawl -
      haha the guy who sold facebook.com must be feeling sorry for himself right now
    1. unclemilty74's Avatar
      unclemilty74 -
      Tried to watch the movie but it was absolutely horrible. All the characters were uppity asshole snobs with zero redeeming likeable qualities. How was this entertaining or informative?? Save your money if you haven't seen it yet, or at least, save your bandwidth if you haven't downloaded it yet.