AT&T’s YellowPages subsidiary purchased the two-letter domain name YP.com (now redirects to yellowpages.com) last month from the company LiveDeal (formerly YP Corp.).

A SEC filing has now revealed that YellowPages acquired the domain name for a cool $3,850,000 in cash payment. That’s a lot of money for an admittedly valuable domain name, especially during this economic downturn. It probably didn’t hurt that YP.com was actually operational and generating revenue for LiveDeal, but we should also note that this amount is roughly half of the publicly listed company’s current market cap.

For the sake of comparison: AT&T (or rather BellSouth and SBC at the time) acquired YellowPages.com for something approaching $100 million dollars a couple of years ago. Its market capitalization, of course, exceeds $165 billion.

Hat tip to George Kirikos for the tip.