Story
The Penny Hoarder: a personal-finance blog that became a $50M affiliate machine
Sam recounts how founder Kyle started The Penny Hoarder as a broke college kid blogging about odd jobs, noticed Uber paid $2,000 per driver referral, and built it into a $50M/year content-plus-performance-marketing business by optimizing articles to drive affiliate signups.
“He started it as a finance blog where basically he was like a poor 20-year-old and he was doing like TaskRabbit and Uber driving and all types of odd jobs in order to make ends meet while he was in college because he came from a low-income household. He would blog about it. Eventually, this is his origin story. I don't know if it's true. He was like, "Oh, wow. Uber will pay me $2,000 for every person I refer to them. I'm going to write a little bit more about this and put more affiliate links." That's what he did.”
Number
The Penny Hoarder sells for $102M on $50M revenue
Shaan summarizes the deal: a ~10-year-old personal finance site with a ~1M email list and 10-17M monthly visitors sold for $102M while doing $50M a year in revenue.
$102M
Acquisition price of The Penny Hoarder · USD
“started 10 years ago, looks like an email list of about a million people, traffic of like 10 to 17 million people a month going to the website and sold it for $102 million and it was doing $50 million a year in revenue.”
Story
The Penny Hoarder: $0 to $60M bootstrapped on affiliate blogging
Sam tells how Kyle Taylor blogged about side hustles he tried when broke (driving Uber, surveys, coupons), earning affiliate fees like $2,000 per Uber driver referral, and scaled The Penny Hoarder from zero to $60 million in sales, fully bootstrapped, in about six years.
“anytime someone saw an article that he wrote about driving for Uber, he would make $2,000 per Uber driver. And so he was like, oh, this is cool. I should— I'm going to blog about all the ways in which I can save money or make extra money.”
Story
Fluent Media cloned The Penny Hoarder by hiring its own employee
Sam recounts how publicly-traded performance marketer Fluent ripped off The Penny Hoarder: they copied the site and articles, ran Facebook traffic at a penny per click for $0.20 in signup value, and according to the lawsuit even hired a Penny Hoarder employee to learn the playbook.
“They just copied the website, copied the articles, and then they threw it on Facebook and they drove traffic to an article that said, here are the 100 best ways to save money. And they did the math so they could get a click for a penny or they could get a click for a dime. And each person who came, they would make $0.20 because that's the conversion rate of which people would sign up.”