Back in March it was reported that Bankrate, Inc. acquired InsuranceAgents.com for an unknown price.
According to a SEC filing it appears the company may have spent $24 to acquire InsuranceAgents.com
“During the six months ended June 30, 2012, the Company acquired certain assets and liabilities of certain entities for an aggregate purchase price of $24.2 million, including $10 million in potential earn out consideration. ”
“These certain entities are individually and in the aggregate immaterial to the Company’s net assets and operations.”
“All acquisitions were accounted for as purchases and are included in the Company’s consolidated results from their acquisition dates. ”
“The Company recorded $2.1 million in goodwill and $22.4 million in intangible assets related to these acquisitions.”
I’m not aware of any other major acquisitions of Bankrate, Inc. for the six months ending June 30, other than InsuranceAgents.com, so for now it looks like they may have spent some $24 million for it.
InsuranceAgents.com was at the time of acquisition a business so it was not a pure domain purchase.
With 2500 exact matches per month. Amazing. Albeit cashflow is probably pretty high.
@sem,
It’s a brandable, plain and simple. Strong brandable-domains are never as liquid as highly searched keyword domains, but they will sell for huge amounts, to the right end-user…might just take a while.
Bankrate does not buy domain names for their intrinsic value, as far as I know. They only buy names with developed businesses on them. So the very high value they seemingly pay for domains has less to do with the names than the underlying business.
CoolPlanet.com sold last week for $40,000 (from dnjournal). DomainWorth.com appraises CoolPlanet.com as being worth $173 (domainworth is a far better tool than estibot).
Brandables are where it’s at…
CityRace.com sold for $11,000 last week (again, from dnjournal – awesome site).
Domainworth.com values cityrace.com at $61 – again, just another HUGE brandable sale, selling at 180 times over appraised value.
@Beach
There are an infinite amount of brandables in the wild. They’re like buying lottery tickets.
This was not a domain purchase, they had an established lead gen business for a number of years, their was a great article feauturing their company and the challenges they had during the 2008-2009 market collapse, running out of money, having to re-evaluate their business plan of attack etc written by INC profiling the fast 500 companies a few years ago. The domain is nice, but its the underlying business and customers that Bankrate was after, the push by Quinstreet and Bankrate to try and get all of the lead gen companies scooped up in this vertical I think will open the door for the next Zillow, someone who thinks out of the box and makes a major push into a huge vertical through some disruption..
You can find the article by googling “inc 500 insurance agents.com” its posted as a Case Study by Inc.
@Tony,
Regarding the “lottery ticket” comment: you’re absolutely right, that’s what makes it such a rush. As I’ve stated before, we’ve turned down $50K+ offers twice for the domain linked above (same buyer)…you wouldn’t believe what we paid for it 🙂
They claimed to have done $11.9M in 2009 according to an INC500 interview. We have heard from a source that revenue was somewhere between $6M and $8M when they sold the business.
It’s a smart exit, as one person pointed out it’s a low exact match term and the long tail isn’t impressive on the root keyword. It’s going to take a lot of work to sustain the SEO and they don’t seem to do any paid search.
The name is geared for actual insurance agents to buy leads from them. Same old type of lead system. They to have obtain the email and basic info then they sell it to 5 or 7 different agents. Old model which is dying. Yeah they get probably 40 or 50 bucks from that one lead, but it is not effective to the agent.And the consumer gets a bad experience which 7 agents calling all at once..LOL….Though they will make their money.
This is why they don’t mind paying 10 or 15 bucks a click. At the end the agent is the one who gets shafted as your going against 5 or 7 other agents.
Better to pay 30 bucks for one exclusive leads and close half of your sales. This other way is not good because they sell the lead to anyone that has a heartbeat.
If you have an insurance site there are much better programs to get paid from as a publisher than this one as I have found out long ago.
Nice to see domainnamesales had about 3 mini city sales in the 5 to 10k range for the term city and insurance.
Don
Lol 24 Million…try 10% of that