Bankrate.com (RATE) spent almost $34 Million Dollars on Domain names and trademarks in 2012.
One of the 2012 acquisitions appears to be the large lead generation site, CardOffers.com which was purchased sometime in October 2012.
Bankrate.com applied for a trademark on Cardoffers.com in October, 2012.
The domain is currently showing as LinkOffers.com as the owner of the domain.
In December 2012, the registered owner Linkoffers.com went into privacy at Godaddy.com
According to the an SEC filing on Friday:
“During the fiscal year ended December 31, 2012, the Company acquired certain assets and liabilities of certain entities for an aggregate purchase price of $52.7 million, including $20.8 million in potential earn out consideration.”
“The Company recorded $6.7 million in goodwill and $46.0 million in intangible assets related to these acquisitions consisting of $33.7 million of trademarks and URLs, $8.0 million of affiliate network, $4.0 million of customer relationships and $0.3 million of developed technology.”
Typically when the assets of the company are acquired the buyer and seller agree to allocate the purchase price over various classes of assets, $33.7 million was the amount allocated of the $6 million in intangible assets in 2012.
According to the same SEC filing last week BankRate owns: Bankrate.com, CreditCards.com, Interest.com, CreditCardGuide.com, InsuranceQuotes.com, CarInsuranceQuotes.com and AutoInsuranceQuotes.com, InsWeb, and InsureMe.com
I smell money laundry
CardOffers.com has less then 10K monthly visitors, the website is template driven with design from 1999. I know there is an affiliate network behind CardOffers called FlexOffers, but still, why would BankRate pay millions for this?
Nice. The price of Rate.com just went up.
The BankRate company owns an Impressive collection of insurance and credit card domains with high CPC and lead generation potential.
Better to own the domains than to spend enormous advertising costs to pursue leads that may not pan out.