Event Summary
NBC Internet
Inc. (NBCi) will pay $225 million in stock to purchase AllBusiness.com. AllBusiness.com
is a business-to-business site offering advice and services to small businesses.
NBCi will use it to develop additional business-to-business offerings.
Market
Impact
AllBusiness.com
is already an attractive small business portal with a rich variety of content
and a marketplace provided by OnSite, which merged with Egghead in July 1999.
The influx of money and resources, including savvy Alan Braverman, President
of NBCi's business-to-business division, will lead to a rapid expansion of AllBusiness.com.
It
is a given that ads for AllBusiness.com will soon be appearing on the peacock
network, and the network that made ER's George Clooney a star and brought discussions
of emergency thorectomies to the water cooler can probably do the same for AllBusiness.com.
However, given that this site is a direct, and extremely strong, competitor
to Microsoft's bCentral, we will have to wait to see which sites get advertised
on MSNBC.
User
Recommendations
Small business owners and entrepreneurs should watch AllBusiness.com carefully
over the next six months. The site's content and money-saving offers will only
become more varied and lucrative, especially as NBCi moves into an aggressive
program of acquiring members.
Larger businesses with E-commerce aspirations will be interested both in opportunities
to sell to smaller companies through the AllBuisness.com marketplace and in
emulating the new ideas that we expect will be implemented on the site.