grelmar - 7:08 am on May 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

I'm going to vote with the "smart move" crowd.

$2.5 Million is peanuts for YP. It's one of the hold-out profitable spinoffs from the TelCo breakup of the 90s. YP advertising has continuously been highly profitable for the publisher, and will likely remain so for the forseeable future.

They can also get good cross-over advertising and revenue from this. Want a quarter page ad in the YP? Price X. Want a comparable ad on the website hotels.ca with a clickable link to your own website? Well, that will merely double the cost.

And advertisers will pay it. Because they have a longstanding relationship with YP, and they trust it's ability to deliver customers. That's something a run-of-the-mill website owner doesn't have. A longstanding (in some cases decades long) relationship with advertisers with proven success.

If they can work up decent sites, and a good revenue model, then nobody will have the ability to monetize the domains like YP can.

With their existing customer base, which is massive beyond belief, if they can even tap a small fraction of those customers into paying for web-space ads, they could turn a profit on the whole deal in less than a year.

If anything, I would expect to see more play for top quality domain names from YP in the future. They have the capital to go for it, and good incentive to do it.