$15M Bankaholic.com Seller Gets Into Domaining
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Johns Wu has a new favorite past time — domaining.
Here’s an interesting story about Johns Wu, who founded the Bankaholic blog and sold it for about $15 million to Bankrate. He’s investing in high quality domain names — part of his “Grand Slam” strategy:
Thankfully, the cash from the Bankaholic sale has enabled me to become a player in the domaining space at a time when domain valuations have corrected as speculative capital has dried up and parking revenues have taken a nosedive.
My strategy is acquiring category killer exact match keyword names in high paying and high traffic niches—and yes, Google gives these domains much respect. I am always acquiring domains with the intention of one-day developing them. My online marketing experience has given me an extremely keen and accurate sense of valuations & development potential for domains… I constantly cold-email domain owners and make aggressive offers. 60% of the time I get no reply. 39% of the time I get an outrageous counter-offer. But the 1% of the time I succeed is worth the effort! All it takes is 1 solid domain to build a multi-million dollar web property.
Wu defines “Grand Slam” as category killer domain + SEO [Search Engine Optimization] traffic + monetization. I won’t bother to tell him that looks like a triple. But if he succeeds like he did with Bankaholic, he’ll turn it into a Grand Slam.
By the way, the site that did the interview has a nice domain name, too: MO.com.
(Hat tip Bruce Marler via Twitter).
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Andrew, thanks for the post about the interview.
@ Brian – nice job. And nice domain, too.
“All it takes is 1 solid domain to build a multi-million dollar web property.”
Now that’s the right attitude.
Another great job by Brian.
Yep, nice domain there he has http://Mo.com, did you see the interview with the Missouri.me founder on there:) Ironic huh.
We thought it was an interesting twist:
http://www.mo.com/entrepreneur-bruce-marler-show-me-the-entrepreneur
No, I hadn’t seen that interview with the founder of Missouri.me. He sounds cool.
heh heh… yes, mo and missouri had fun with that one
LOL Andrew, he is AWESOME!!
Nice article, thanks. A friend emailed me the link to this article, suggesting I could make even more than what Wu made with Bankaholic.com selling one of my domains such as;
http://www.CarbonEmissions.com
http://www.GreenhouseGasEmissions.com
as these domains represent markets that will be worth $3.9 Trillion by 2012 according to the U.N. Not that I would ever consider selling as this is how we market our products and services. But it’s still nice to know.
Whoever paid $15m for a poxy crap blog like that must need their heads looking at,i could do better and bigger with $10k
@ Stu – eh, the buyers knew exactly how much revenue the blog was making since they were a big partner. They knew what they were doing.
@stu
“i could do better and bigger with $10k”
Then why don’t you? Oh thats right, you’re just an irrelevant troll.
@stu
Bankrate owns their own credit card affiliate company NCSReporting.com. They know clearly how much bankaholic.com can earn before they made their decision.
@stu
jealous much?
[...] also recently bought the Bankaholic blog for $15 [...]
I’m happy for John Wu and his great achievement, thanks for posting.