Just a thought, but advertising is pretty cheap right now and should be for a little while; all the same, over the long term it goes up and down. If you wanted to create a brand in the "food" industry, right now... Culinary.Com will definitely save you well more than $99,500 in advertising fees over something like JohnsCulinary.Com or Cheap Kitchen Stuff or (as George suggests) LearnToCook.Com (which wouldn't be cheap either) or FoodSchooling.com. Etc etc.
Simply, someone would have to hear "Culinary.Com" less times to remember it. Even if they have to hear it 5 times instead of 6, that's an estimated savings of more than 10%... if you spent $1 million on advertising, you just saved over 10%.
So ... If they actually had $100k to pay for it, then they probably also have the advertising budget to back it up with. If that's the case, it was a steal. This, in itself, assumes they were an "end user" and not a reseller hoping to turn a quickie profit.
Well... Just my humble opinion. ;-)