The Penny Hoarder: From Personal Blog to $50M Revenue in 10 Years — and a $102.5M All-Cash Exit at About 2x Sales

On December 21, 2020, the US personal finance outlet The Penny Hoarder was sold to Nasdaq-listed Sykes Enterprises. According to reporting by local paper St. Pete Catalyst, the consideration was $102.5M, all cash. Trailing-twelve-month revenue at the time of sale (through September 30, 2020) was $50M, putting the price at almost exactly twice sales. It began in 2010 as a personal blog opened by Kyle Taylor in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Among the blog and media exits this site records, $102.5M is among the largest figures. And the company took no outside investment. Per St. Pete Catalyst’s company profile, The Penny Hoarder was bootstrapped from founding, employed about 80 people as of 2017, was named Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing private media company two years running, and placed 25th on the overall list. A personal savings blog, with zero funding, was exchanged for nine figures of cash within ten years.

The deal and the company in numbers

• Announced: December 21, 2020
• Consideration: $102.5M (all cash)
• Buyer: Sykes Enterprises (Nasdaq: SYKE), via digital marketing subsidiary Clearlink
• Trailing-twelve-month revenue: $50M (as of September 30, 2020)
• Price ÷ revenue: about 2.05x
• Founded: 2010, as Kyle Taylor’s personal blog
• Outside funding: none (bootstrapped since founding)
• Employees: about 80 as of 2017; after the deal, all employees received offers in the new organization
• Base: St. Petersburg, Florida (retained after the acquisition)

Taylor stayed on as founder and CEO. The deal took the form of Sykes acquiring the stock of operating company Taylor Media Corp., and per St. Pete Catalyst no changes to operations were planned for the foreseeable future. The readership was described as “millions worldwide,” and the content had expanded beyond frugality tips into job listings, personal stories, and video. As of 2017 the company had announced plans to hire 165 more people by 2020. It had been in an aggressive scaling phase for three years before the sale.

The buyer’s logic — why would a call-center company buy a media outlet?

Sykes was primarily a major customer-support outsourcer, and Clearlink is its arm assembling consumer-facing digital media. Announcing the deal, CEO Chuck Sykes said the company was “focused on building a portfolio of digital media assets that help consumers find, buy and use products” through Clearlink’s digital media group. Clearlink already ran comparison and referral media in home services and insurance; buying The Penny Hoarder extended that into personal finance.

In other words, $102.5M was less a price on ad inventory than the price of connecting “a huge audience researching money” to a referral business. Personal finance is dense with high-payout products (insurance, cards, financial services) so the latent value per reader is high. A personal-blog-born outlet, absorbed with its accumulated audience by an operating company with referral infrastructure: structurally, this is the same pattern as Investor Junkie, the SEO-driven finance blog sold for $5.8M after nine years, two orders of magnitude larger.

How to read a 2x-revenue multiple

Against $50M in revenue, $102.5M is, despite appearances, a modest multiple. With SaaS businesses discussed at several to nearly ten times revenue, content media at roughly 2x is partly the price of income that sits permanently exposed to algorithm and traffic swings. 2020, with its stay-at-home economy and financial anxiety, was a strong moment for personal finance media, and whether the $50M TTM was a peak reading or cruising speed cannot be judged from outside.

Profit was not disclosed either. How much of the $50M was kept, and what multiple of earnings $102.5M represents, cannot be known from the reporting. All cash with no earnout is a seller-friendly structure, but whether that reflects negotiating leverage or the buyer’s strategic necessity is likewise invisible from outside. This case rests on press reports and the buyer’s announcements, not on the operator’s own disclosures, a discount worth keeping in mind.

One more reading: all-cash settlement means the founder did not have to tie his outcome to a public company’s stock or future performance conditions. A founder who ran bootstrapped for ten years made his first outside-capital event the exit itself, because no funding rounds intervened, the entire price passed undiluted to the shareholders, in this case essentially the founder’s side. That is a feature of this deal more important than it looks.

Conditions for repetition, and the limits

The Penny Hoarder’s path (personal blog, to an 80-person bootstrapped staff, to an all-cash sale to an operating company) is, in outline, the completed form of the personal-blogger trajectory. But the conditions are demanding. The field: personal finance, where reader value runs highest. The timing: starting in 2010, when building search and social traffic through content cost far less than it does now. The buyer: Clearlink’s referral infrastructure already existed, so the audience could be converted to revenue immediately.

At the same time, the case illustrates that media exits are opened by the buyer’s strategy. In the sale of case-study interview site Starter Story to HubSpot, as in the sale of the anonymous personal finance blog Budgets Are Sexy to a Motley Fool company, the buyer was not a fellow media firm but a company wanting to connect an audience to its own business. For founder-built media, the biggest buyers live outside the media industry.

No one should generalize from this case that “the standard media exit multiple is 2x revenue.” But as the record of a zero-outside-capital personal blog exchanged for $102.5M in cash within ten years, it marks the upper bound of what the blog as a business form has demonstrated. An upper bound is not a median, with that caveat attached, the number is worth keeping on file.