Facebook has dropped out a cool $8.5 million to acquire the domain FB.com. According to a Reuters report, Facebook bought the Web address from the American Farm Bureau Federation to for Facebook employees’ internal use. The transaction was announced by Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Nov. 15 when the company unveiled its retooled messaging system. Zuckerberg said that the employees were already using the site in addition to adoption email addresses ending in FB.com. At the time, financial details of the sale were not disclosed.
“The farm bureau has agreed to give us FB.com and we in return have agreed not to sell Farm subsidies,” Zuckerberg told TechCrunch at the time.
at an annual meeting on Tuesday, officials from the American Farm Bureau reported that the organization had earned $8.5 million from the sale of “a couple of domain names.” However, the group could not divulge the identity of the buyer. Previously, FB.com was the primary domain for the group, but Reuters said the organization “may own four dozen domain names related to farming.” Now FB.com automatically redirects to Facebook.
The last time Facebook made headlines for buying a domain name was in August 2005, when it paid $200,000 to land Facebook.com. At the time, the now 500-million user social-networking giant was still known as TheFacebook. The FB.com domain is not the only acquisition Facebook made in 2010. Although Google led the pack with the most acquisitions of the year, Facebook made five purchases of its own. Facebook’s purchases included for example, startup Chai Labs and recommendation site Nextstop.
Try it! 🙂 FB.com (http://www.fb.com)