22 Year old makes $15 million from…
Posted by Joe in Hot Posts, Motivation At Work - Inspirations For The Soul, Stories of Internet SuccessBankaholic, a blog ran by John Wu, which covers the financial industry has been purchased by Bankrate, a financial information provider, for $15 million.
Luckily the sale appears to have taken place before the recent Wall St. issues. Wu, the founder and individual creator of Bankaholic, has received $12.4 million for his blog and may also receive an additional bonus of $2.5 million for attaining certain performance results over the next 12 months.
Bankaholic provides information such as ratings of financial instruments like savings and (MMA) money market accounts, certificates of deposit (CD’s), they also insurance quotes and compare credit card offers. All of which are currently supplied by Bankrate. Visitors to the site also have the ability to comment on and rate the services of banks and financial promotions being offered.
Bankaholic is a log created on a WordPress platform. It receives income from affiliate commissions and Google adsense. In a recent quote, Thomas R. Evans, President and CEO of Bankrate, stated “We have been working with Bankaholic in a co-brand relationship since July and have seen first-hand the volume and quality of its traffic,”. “Bankaholic is ranked high in natural search for both deposit and credit card keywords. We believe their organic traffic will increase our deposit and credit card revenue, and with a high composition of free traffic, will help to improve margins,”.
Regardless of what your thoughts are about this transaction you have to give Wu credit He picked a niche. He committed and it paid off for him.
Here are the current stats, as of October 17, 2008, for Bankaholic. Quantcast registers 146,800 unique visitors with 216,000 visits and Compete registers 319,00 unique visitors per month.
So how do you feel about the deal? Was it a good deal for Wu, was it a bargain for Bankrate? Leave a comment and tell us your thoughts.
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I’m one of those people who always believes that something is worth whatever someone else will pay for it. It was a bargain for Wu, although from what I read he still will have to write the blog for them, though I don’t know for how long. But he obviously did it right; targeted a particular audience that found him and wanted and needed more. Brilliant kid; any idea which college he went to, if he went to college?
Mitch.
Not sure if he did go to college. And yes, brilliant, he followed the basics and took action. More than most do.
Thanks for the comment.
Hey, thanks for posting.. I enjoyed reading it.