Facebook acquired the domain name facebook.com in 2005. The company paid $200,000 to obtain the domain from AboutFace Corporation and then dropped “The” from its original name, TheFacebook.
Mark Zuckerberg and his co-founders launched the service in February 2004 as TheFacebook.com, initially for Harvard students. As the network expanded to other universities, the shorter Facebook name became more useful for a growing company. Securing the matching domain helped formalize that change and gave the business a simpler public identity.
This purchase is often confused with Facebook’s later acquisition of fb.com. Facebook announced that deal in 2010, buying the domain from the American Farm Bureau Federation; the price was later reported as $8.5 million. Thus, 2005 refers to facebook.com, while 2010 refers to fb.com.