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 November, it was revealed that Facebook was launching a revamped version of Messages. It combined SMS, messaging, chat and e-mail into one interface, although Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly iterated that, “It’s not e-mail.”
One feature of the new Facebook Messages is that it assigns you a personalized Facebook.com e-mail address. If a friend sends a message to your Facebook e-mail, you will receive it in your Facebook Inbox. Unfortunately, Facebook’s employees were using the Facebook.com domain for their e-mails already, so they had to switch to another domain, which is why Facebook needed to buy Fb.com in the first place.
Facebook acquired the domain sometime last year from the American Farm Bureau Federation, which uses fb.org as its primary domain. 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.
