Bankrate has been acquiring companies at least since December 2007.

Here is a short list,

Dec 2007 - NCS (Nationwide Card Services)

Dec 2007 - SavingforCollege.com

Sept 2008 - CreditCardGuide.com http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/bankrate-inc-expands-i...

Sept 2008 - Bankaholic.com

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/bankrate-inc-announces...

I listened to this call last Wednesday (about an hour long), http://investor.bankrate.com/eventdetail.cfm?eventid=59808

Here is what I learned,

- credit card "affiliates" who drive customers to credit card companies generate more revenue for bankrate.com

- years of working together (atleast two of the companies listed above including bankaholic.com resulted in the deal)

- organic google search results are certainly useful but I guess beyond that traditional "models" helped realize more revenues, this is purely my interpretation.

They seem to have peaked around 200k in traffic last month.

My company is in a similar space as bankaholic, but overall I think we are growing to have much better content. It's hard to believe $15 million went for what is essentially a blog.

Full disclosure: I'm a partner in http://www.mybanktracker.com/ Check it out if you have a sec. We haven't fully launched, but when we do I'll post a 'Checkout my startup' post to yc.

15 million for a profitable website in a very large and lucrative space (as you know). This was a DCF acquisition - not a talent one.

15 million? nah...these days you have to worth 15 billion on the paper to get noticed

At least this guy's 15 million is on green paper.

ha. its just funny you can do something so under the radar and make a crap ton of money.

You've always been able to do that - most successful entrepreneurs exit for $5-20M and you'd never know they were millionaires unless they told you about their work history. I knew a couple of them growing up...

I remember a quote from Donald Trump which said "If you don't tell people about your success, They will never know".

damn. this is ridiculous and i knew him when he just started the site.

Hope he didn't stick it in a WaMu account.

Doesn't matter. JPM backs it now.

And the latest post on the front page (from 3 days ago) is about WaMu bumping up their CD rates... although he does recommend checking out FDIC insurance coverage.

and? Money in WaMu CDs is still there, and insured as long as its less than 100K

You have to remember that it's up to $100k for all your accounts at a bank and not for each one. So say you had $75k in one and $50k in another. You'd be out $25k.

So diversify your cash across banks (although that's harder and harder with all the acquisitions going on).

> You'd be out $25k.

Only if JP Morgan Chase goes under.

In this case, yes. JP Morgan was backing all the deposits at WaMu. But in general, don't count on this happening when a bank fails.

15 million for a one man operation is very impressive. Any idea how much fleaflicker was acquired for?