Ever Heard of a website called Bankaholic? Its run by one man and promises to give you a a breakdown of all the best financial rates across the US. It sounds remarkably like a smaller, US version of MoneySavingExpert.com!

Last month it sold for £10 million to bankrate.com the US version of moneysupermarket.com.

The question everyone is asking is why?

It seems the answer is to do with advertising.

We have mentioned on this site before about the very small response rate from online advertising, with figures of 1% being normal. In the world of financial advertising, the Pay Per Click keyterms have been getting very expensive, as companies bid to be the number one company for various specialist terms. In some cases, the clicks have been as high as £32 each.
If you are paying £32 per visitor, and only 1% are going to buy – you are paying £3200 for each sale! At this sort of figure, £10 million for a website which has a loyal band of readers seems very good value.

It is interesting that there seems to be two places to make BIG money on the web these days. You can either deal with financial information or you can entertain, as seen with YouTube.com. This news may inspire some others to start blogging!

Originally posted 2008-11-24 09:57:41.