Facebook Pixel
Join our Facebook Community

1 Man Blog Sells for $15 Million Dollars

Posted By Darren Rowse 2nd of October 2008 Pro Blogging News 0 Comments

I’ve had four people email me this news in the last 10 minutes. PaidContent is reporting that a WP blog by the name of Bankaholic has just been acquired by BankRate For Up To $15 Million.

Bankaholic has a staff of 1 (Johns Wu) who will remain on at the blog.

If this price is true it’s a fairly decent sale for Mr Wu (understatement of the year) – the blog has an Alexa ranking of 42,168 and averages less than 20 comments per post. The blog does seem to rank very well for a lot of bank terms and I’m sure drives targeted traffic and would convert well with affiliate products – but this is still a fairly inspiring sale!

Here’s the Google Trends chart of the blog showing a steady growth over the last year.

Hat tip to Patrick who was first to let me know of this.

updated for accuracy

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. wow thats a pretty huge amount for a 1 man blog. This clearly shows hard work and dedication always pays off!

  2. Wow, thats seriously incredible.
    Looks like the web is the new real estate industry.

  3. OMG! $15M Am I reading the correct number? Is it $15k or $15M :D

  4. Right…that’s it! I’m going to start a blog

  5. That’s amazing! Very inspiring for a newbie blogger like myself.

  6. ****!

    Unbelievable stuff, come the day when I sell a blog for $15 million.

    Regards,
    Carl

  7. Wow–that is amazing. Christian just might be right–blog sales may be the new real estate industry. Can the days of “build a blog and flip it for astronomical profit” be far behind?

  8. Wow, 15 million dollars is a big amount. Wonder what that will do with his credibility, though…

  9. That’s huge price given away..
    Alexa not good, not pretty good in SERPs and what for the price for $15,000,000???

  10. Holy shmeeholy! That’s so crazy and so awesome, isn’t it? This new frontier we’re all conquering…..

    My son is in the room on his computer and right before you tweeted this crazy wild awesome news – he had told me that a house was sold on eBay for “one dollar and seventy-five cents”! That is some serious backwardness there! LOL!

  11. That is amazing! The question I would have is is this the first type of action to happen regarding a 1 man blog in such a huge amount?

  12. Wow, that is a lot many, but I think Problogger will be worthy twice than that one.

  13. That’s pretty huge, to get so much of money for a single blog. But that also shows that if you put the efforts in the right niche and market, you are bound to succeed, so guess this should definitely motivate the blog owners and Internet marketers to push for better content and exposure.

  14. Wow this is amazing news! It’s unbelievable!

    There is hope for all of us :-)

  15. That’s just insane… I can’t imagine the blog’s advertising revenues are that high. At any rate, this is big news for the industry. It’s nice to see that blogs are being taken seriously.

    Now if I could only sell a blog for $15M …

  16. Not that this in any way takes away from the amazing accomplishment but it wasn’t really a blog, WordPress was just the CMS used for the site. He did an excellent job targeting keyword terms that Bankrate loves and purchased a ton of links (do a yahoo linkdomain search on the site).

    A phenomenal achievement but it’s really a blog in CMS only.

  17. goodness me! that is insane. gives me hope for an idea i’m working on.

    I guess it just shows that banks have too much money.

    sean

  18. Okay, I’m pleased to see that at least that $15M blog is about something other than selling in the abstract. Can you explain more about its “Alexa rating”? Is that a particularly good one that makes it worth that kind of money? Or is $15M no longer such a large amount?

  19. And I’d say now that ProBlogger(s) have learned of it, this minor frenzy has erupted, and it’s hit twitter… those numbers BankRate purchased just got a leeettle bit better!

  20. Robert Scoble did an interview with Mukesh Chatter (CEO of startup MoneyAisle) last week where Chatter said:

    “Just in last three years alone, the prices for some of the bids have gone up 200% to 300% As an example from google, to be one of the top three advertisers for “high yield savings,” you have to pay $13.20 for a click. With a 1% conversion, it costs you $1,300 to acquire a customer”

    Those are the numbers behind this sale — essentially lead generation.

  21. WOW! Great job Mr. Wu. Looks like the site requires a lot of work. Time to hire a staff and start another one.

  22. Wow is right. That’s incredible and good news for anyone making a blog. Thanks for sharing.

  23. I await the publication of a book entitled Eight-Figure Blogging.

  24. “Fairly decent”? That’s the understatement of the century! Sadly he doesn’t have FeedCount enabled so we can’t see the subscriber level, but regardless.. that’s an awesome amount :)

  25. This is totally unbelievable! I checked the blog and it seem to be very accurate and keen in posting banking issues and related facts.

    For a blog this expensive, this should be in the Guinness!

    I think a lot of bloggers will be inspired by this news!

  26. Wow,

    A single person wrong blog for 15 million. That is crazy. I can’t imagine how long it will take to earn 15 million back from the blog. I mean even if the blog makes 500k a year it would take nearly 8 years to make that kind of money and that is without expenses.

    If you were to start a blog now in 8 years you could be making some serious income and you wouldn’t have the 15 mil price tag on it.

  27. Doesn’t sound too bad of a deal. $15M & on top of that… he gets to remain as the writer of the blog.

    Seems to me, if he wanted to, he could still have affiliate links in his posts and make even more money.

  28. I kind of feel like my excitement over my first $0.07 in Adsense earnings was a bit unwarranted now. :-P

    I only just launched on 9/25 and we all have to start somewhere though, right? Very encouraging news.

    Jeff
    http://www.2lincolns.com

  29. That is a mighty sell. Quite lucky I say. Quite lucky.

  30. Ooh! A new Problogger book! I’m off to buy, right now.

  31. IF its true, then it is truly an incredible thing. And I hope it is, but I’ll take it with a grain of salt until I know positivly, without a doubt!

    Even at 15 K, it would be inspiring!!

  32. I’d be happy with just 1 percent of that!

  33. Sorry but I don’t understand Alexa rankings.

    Is 42,168 good, bad or indifferent?

    Cheers
    Dave

  34. My god.. that is unreal! Amazing sale..!!

  35. Nice work if you can get it.

    By the way david last commentor, 42,168 Alexa rank is not bad the lower the rank the better. Google has an alexa rank of 1 and a new blog would be about 2,000,000

  36. I’d be willing to sell my blog for like $15.

  37. Please stop using Alexa as some sort of reliable traffic comparison source, use Compete.

  38. Ok, so I totally agree with Young on this. Man what a coup for him. That’s just crazy…I’m just trying to get my adsense revenue over $5 – thats for ALL TIME, by the way lol.

  39. OMG… the site is only 2 years, 2 months and 1 day old as of now… the guy just hit a jackpot…

  40. That is nice.. looks like nothing is impossible than in the blog market. Let’s all make money on the blog. And I will continue to teach newbies how they can start their own blogs…

  41. Good for John. I am sure that we all wish our blogs were worth that much cash.

  42. Congrats Mr Wu. I work in a large UK bank in London and have thought about starting a bank blog considering it’s my job to know whats happening.

    I might just consider it now thanks to MR Wu. It does sem pretty insane that somebody has done alright out of the crisis

  43. My blog has an alexa at 65,000, does that mean I can get 10 million?

  44. Thats crazy, how the hell does that work? The person purchasing the site must want it bad.

  45. Sorry… My blog is not for sale. :P

  46. Seriously, with that amount of money if my blogs worth, and in which i could sold(if only), well, I am sure happy for John that he grab the cash. I’m sure there are some or many of us here have blogs or site which worth similar amount.

    Congrats to John and hope to congrats others here that commented too.

  47. “Alexa not good, not pretty good in SERPs and what for the price for $15,000,000???”

    First, you’re wrong. Google any of the keywords that show up in his title tag (i.e. the text that appears at the top of the browser, above the menu): “cd rates,” “money market rates,” and “high interest savings accounts.” Bankaholic is at the top of SERP 1 for each of these. It’s even SERP 1 (result 9) for “credit cards,” which by itself would make it a million-dollar blog. I wouldn’t be surprised if the BankRate recovered 20 percent of what the purchase price in 18 months just from brokering credit cards.

    Second, to understand why Bankaholic is worth $15M you have to stop thinking like a blogger and more like an internet marketer (I’m a blogger, by the way, so don’t think I’m being condescending). Bloggers obsess over social traffic, illustrated by Darren mentioning the relatively low number of comments on the blog. The spend their time leveraging social networks and building their subscriber base. They want to be popular.

    Internet marketers know that popularity doesn’t pay the mortgage. Conversion does. Bankaholic draws qualified traffic through shrewd SEO. Anyone googling the above search terms probably has money to spend, and is a far more reliable conversion prospect than a visitor from StumbleUpon.

  48. Maybe I can flip my blog for a house let’s start the bidding at a condo on the Hudson

  49. Dude man that’s a lot of money for an Internet web site. I can’t see that site selling for that much money. If it did then that is cool and I want to know what he did to get that money.

A Practical Podcast… to Help You Build a Better Blog

The ProBlogger Podcast

A Practical Podcast…

Close
Open