Bankaholic Snapped Up for $15 Million by BankRate

For many years there’s been much debate whether blogging can actually be a financially viable past-time. After all, there are millions of bloggers but there is only so many millions of dollars to go around. Some successful bloggers make quite a bit of money from advertising revenue these days, but for the majority, their incomes are pretty minimal at best.

In news that will no doubt give many professional bloggers a sparkle in their eye (there’s gold in them hills!), financial portal BankRate has just purchased Bankaholic, for over $15 million US dollars. That’s $12.4 million up front, with a little more as icing on the cake once the transaction completes.

In this day and age of mega acquisitions and transactions, $15 million doesn’t sound like much, except that Bankaholic is not your typical start up. It’s founded, run and written by one man, John Wu. Bankaholic is also powered by the open source Wordpress blog system, so it’s not exactly what you would call an enterprise powered blog, and one could assume Bankaholic does not have too many large overheads, apart from Mr Wu’s own personal sacrifices.

That said, John Wu has obviously been able to take a highly focused, highly targeted, highly valuable blogging niche and ultimately reap the big rewards. This large aquisiton is certainly no indication of a new trend, rather it’s one guy that managed to build something (and by himself, kudos to that) that managed to become valuable enough to one particular buyer. It’s certainly no indication that every mom’n’pop blog is now going to be the target of the larger fish in the pond.

Given the current financial markets, it’s probably more of an oddity than anything else, but it’s also not surprising. The current financial crisis has also sparked an awareness and interest in financial services in your typical consumer. Perhaps in such climates, BankRate believes that this is a way to get more exposure to their network than would be possible in the future, when the bull markets return. As they say, buy low, sell high.