Strategic Acquisition of Competing Gardening Blog

Kevin Espiritu shares a story about acquiring a competing gardening blog to boost his company's traffic and revenue.

"The second biggest acquisition we did was actually a media acquisition. A friend of mine from the old SEO days had built a gardening blog. We were hiring for a Director of Editorial to run our blog, which was doing well with maybe 8-10 million sessions a year.

This guy emails me and says, 'Hey, I saw that Head of Editorial position. I'm working in SEO right now, but I've also been building a gardening blog on the side called All About Gardening.com. I'd like to put my hat in the ring for the job, but I kind of have a competing blog.'

I thought, 'You can't work for us and run that blog, so what if we bought your blog and hired you to run our blog?' He agreed. We bought the blog and migrated his into ours. Both were doing about 10 million sessions a year. You'd think 10 + 10 is 20, but our blog from an SEO perspective was super strong. By migrating his into ours, we got like a 20-30% premium on the traffic. So 10 + 10 equals 25.

We're monetizing better off the display ads, but we also made more from the ads themselves. Effectively, the acquisition financed itself by the increased revenue from month one. We now have an awesome leader running our blog at a higher level than before, our traffic has over doubled, and we're monetizing at over double the rate on the traffic."