Bankaholic.com , a one man outfit run by John Wu was recently acquired (Sep 2008) by Bankrate.com , one of the largest online personal finance networks.
Bankaholic is essentially a blog with comparison pages for financial products such as Certificates of Deposit, along with bank reviews, offer pages for products and so on. Some of the content, like CD rate comparisons is in fact already “powered by Bankrate.com” so it would seem a natural fit.
The price was $12.4 million up front with up to an additional $2.5 million earn out over the next year, based on performance.
The site has grown from its launch in July 2006 as a project during Wu’s student days and currently has traffic of around 300K unique visitors a month, as reported by Compete - under a tenth of Bankrate.com’s traffic . It rates very highly in Google for such competitive and lucrative terms as “cd rates” , “credit card offers” and so on which will likely drive a large number of high value customers via organic search.
Traffic Data :
Bankaholic.com on quantcast.com
Sources :
Reuters press release , paidcontent.org , Noah Kagan , YCombinator discussion , Washington Post article , Bankrate.com (Businessweek profile)
