Local Onliner

To me, the real story behind RH Donnelley’s $345 million purchase of Business.com is it has bought itself a franchise player in former Disney exec Jake Winebaum. He’s going to get things going for RHD on the Internet side in a way that the rock hard, sales-oriented culture hasn’t really done before.

Is Winebaum and his team worth paying a super-premium on a company that grossed $60 million last year? It all depends, but probably yes.

During a conference call yesterday, RHD Chairman Dave Swanson said that the acquisition is going to move RHD’s Internet timetable “up 14 months.” RHD had previously made big Internet investments with LocalLaunch, an SEO company. The Dex acquisition was also partially related to the Web. DexKnows is a strong IYP.

While both companies brought major assets and strong executives to the table, it turned out that neither have had a transformative impact on RHD. Indeed, the company’s Internet revenues make up just over 2 percent of overall revenues; well below its peers.

In Winebaum, RHD gets a seasoned media executive who was previously entrusted with Disney’s interactive strategy, after great success with Disney’s family magazine division. In this position, he apparently enjoyed the total confidence of CEO Michael Eisner — a tough taskmaster if there has ever been one. At the time, there were numerous accounts about how he rode herd over a comfortable company culture ….something he will need to do again at RHD.

With Disney Interactive, Winebaum did a great job of consolidating forces. But he didn’t really repeat his success. He left early — well before Disney’s Go.com portal really went down the drain — to start his Internet incubator with Earthlink founder Sky Dayton. And then, in true dotcom fashion, most of the Winebaum/Dayton incubator efforts didn’t pan out. In the end, Winebaum finally devoted his energy to Business.com, a B2B directory effort.

Business.com itself is an interesting acquisition for RHD. It’s now got 6,000 advertisers, but the focus is almost entirely on national. RHD has been flirting with B2B with its ChicagoB2B startup. It isn’t clear whether there will be more local B2B in the works under Winebaum.

During the conference call, Swanson said that Business.com is going to bring a full, upgraded package of Internet services to RHD, and it probably does. It comes complete with a 100 person staff, based in Santa Monica. They bring a little bit of “cool” to RHD.

Cited as deal strengths are Business.com’s self-provisioning ad software (although not for RHD’s small business advertisers), its ad networking capability, its Web review and rating system and its relationships with national advertisers – always seen as the Holy Grail by Yellow Pages players. Less than 15 percent of YP revenues are national today.

To be sure, all these things are important pieces of the puzzle. The potential value of business.com as a destination site, and the business.com URL are worth something too – perhaps even more than the $7.5 million that Winebaum and Dayton originally paid during the dotcom excess.

But what makes the deal is the sense that RHD is putting a major player in the driver’s seat of its next generation – a media executive who has spent the past several years learning about the non-glitzy world of business advertisers and services. If they have patience with each other, it can really work out.