Facebook Paid $8.5 Million For FB.com

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Facebook acquired domain FB.com from the American Farm Bureau Federation for up to $8.5 million, more than 42 times the amount the company originally paid for Facebook.com.

Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in November that the social media giant had purchased the domain from the agricultural organization for an undisclosed sum. At its yearly meeting, however, the non-profit American Farm Bureau -- which now uses FB.org -- revealed it earned $8.5 million from the sale of a couple of domain names, according to Reuters. The group is barred from disclosing the buyer, Reuters said.

"The Farm Bureau agreed to sell us fb.com and we in return have agreed not to sell farm subsidies," Zuckerberg was quoted on TechCrunch.

Click on FB.com today, and users are directed to Facebook.com. At first, online reports speculated that employees would use FB.com for internal communication. But some reports speculate Facebook plans to incorporate the new domain into the revamped version of Messages, which melds SMS, messaging, chat, and email into one interface.

With Facebook Messages , the system assigns users a personalized Facebook email address that appears in the Facebook inbox. Since Facebook employees already used Facebook.com for their emails, the company needed another domain, according to Mashable. The new messaging -- which Facebook frequently describes as "not email" -- is undergoing a gradual rollout, said Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, in a company blog.

"We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they're on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message," he said in November.

Back in August 2005, TheFacebook purchased Facebook.com for $200,000 -- 42.5 times less than the estimated price tag for FB.com.