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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Ah, so it's a business! From the title I thought it was just a domain purchase, that would be the greatest (disclosed) ever by a significant amount if it was.

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Wasn't broadcast.com sold for 5 billion?

broadcast.com was a company, not a domain name alone.

now it's just a domain name that redirects to yahoo homepage

Having been at Y! when broadcast was bought and having seen behind the curtain, I think you are seriously overestimating what was purchased...

yeah. I actually flagged the article because that headline is far too misleading (not themichael's fault).

I'm surprised, diapers.com should be pretty well known to anyone interested in business or entrepreneurship.

Should it? Why? I have no kids and am in the UK. Is it a famous business case study? Even if it is, I'm a computer scientist not a business guy.

The headline makes it sound like they bought the domain name for that figure, which is sensationalist and inaccurate.

If that's their company name ( http://www.diapers.com/aboutus/aboutus.aspx ), that's their company name. Take it up with diapers.com (the company, not the domain name) if it's confusing. For the record, I agree with you, but a bunch of parenthesized "we mean the company, not just the domain name" seems superfluous given that the rest of the article is a click away.

And yet the headline didn't say "Amazon.com to buy Diapers.com"...

("Amazon.com, Inc." is the name of the company.)

Yeah, it's nice to be so famous you're known by your first name only. Cher, Rosanne, Oprah.

"Amazon buys Diapers for $540 million" would also have been a set up for misunderstandings in it's own way.

They got a lot of press (at least in the US) for their innovative procurement robots... that's how a lot of kidless American geeks found out about their success.

http://singularityhub.com/2010/06/10/whats-the-secret-behind...

Maybe I shouldn't go so far as to say what others should know, but I don't have kids either and I'm aware of Diapers.com, and I'm more developer than business man (or at least I suck at being a business man).

I certainly don't think the title is sensationalist, but for the sake of clarity (given the up/down votes of complaints such as yours) perhaps it should have been made more clear that a company was purchased and not a domain name. On the other hand, would there be any confusion if it was Zappos.com?

I heard of Diapers.com from HN, and I've seen several articles about it on here, so I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption to make. Diapers.com is a big competitor for Amazon.com on the baby stuff, so it's a good acquisition for them.

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