italiandragon - actually they purchased Lexico Publishing Group which owns the 3 domains ... (dictionary.com , thesaurus.com and reference.com) ... so it is not just a "domain-sale" but more like a company acquisition ... in a kind of similar way , the myspace.com domain was not sold for
$580M (
$650M according to some sources) , it was the whole company (Intermix Media) that was sold ...
(by the way , regarding MySpace , NewsCorp was recently considering to
sell MySpace to Yahoo for 25% of Yahoo shares ... Yahoo's current Market Cap is ~$37 BILLION ... so that would be ~$9 BILLION (even though the some sources state $12 BILLION))
of course the "Dictionary.com" sale is great news for domainers since the names (and their traffic ... 11.5 uniques in June) played a
huge part in the agreement ...
also as seen in
this link answers.com are kind of in a buying streak ... bought faqfarm.com (12 million pageviews per month back then) for $2M a year ago ... and brainboost for $10M two years ago ...