So what do cars have to do with jewelry?  After homes, and then cars, jewelry is the most insured asset in the world.​ ​​​​

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The year was 1997, and if you were in the newspaper business, the Internet was not only transforming news dissemination but also posing a serious challenge to the lucrative automotive classified advertisement business.  Five media giants including Gannett, The McClatchey Company, and Tribune Media Company, all of whom depended upon automotive classifieds for a large chunk of their revenue and profits, decided they needed to act quickly and founded Classified Ventures.

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Classified Ventures promptly acquired the highly marketable domain name Cars.com for an undisclosed sum in the secondary domain market as their online trade name.

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To put these newspaper companies' collective reach into perspective, Gannett operates 200 daily newspapers and over 1,000 weekly publications.  The McClatchey Company owns 30 local newspapers in 14 different states.  And Tribune Media publishes over 75 local newspapers.

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In July of 1997 Classified Ventures hired it's very first employee, Mitch Golub.  Mitch's responsibilities included executing the Cars.com defined strategy, building portfolios, and maintain industry leadership in the automotive classifieds sector.  The next key hire was William Swislow who oversaw the website's editorial content.

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In order to drive traffic to its website, Cars.com primarily relied upon the strength of its newspaper backers, search engine optimization, and the easy to remember/spell domain name Cars.com.  In 2004 Cars.com began their first large scale national advertising in connection with Kelley Blue Book, the automotive valuation and research leader.  The next big milestone occurred in 2007 when Cars.com announced a partnership with Yahoo! and their automotive services segment.​

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By 2014, revenue and profits from the Cars.com joint venture became somewhat consistent and dependable.  Gannett therefore decided it was time to buy the 73% share of Cars.com from the founding media consortium which the media behemoth didn't already own.  Using cash on hand and borrowings, Gannett doled out $1.83B to own all of the venture, valuing the Cars.com business at $2.5B.

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How instrumental was the domain name Cars.com in the success of Classified Ventures online automotive classifieds business?  According to Gannett's public auditors, Ernst & Young, the goodwill associated with the domain name Cars.com was a whopping $872M, or approximately 35% of the value of the entire Cars.com business.

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