The Half Marathon Guide: “Just Half Marathon Race Info” Adds Up to $1.2M — Sold to an Individual Buyer

16 Years With a Day Job, ¥180M

The Half Marathon Guide is an information site cataloging “half marathons across America,” launched by Terrell Johnson in 2006. It organized a race calendar by city and date, along with course information and training articles, and held its ground for years on the go-to search query pattern “half marathon [city name].” The number of races listed grew from about 700 at launch to over 2,500 by the time of sale.

What’s easy to miss: Johnson ran this site for most of those 16 years while working as a UX designer at The Weather Channel and State Farm. This site was, start to finish, a side business run alongside a day job. Even so, it generated a cumulative ~$1.2M (about ¥180M) from Google AdSense alone, with annual revenue peaking above $130K (about ¥19.5M).

In July 2022, through site-brokerage firm Quiet Light, it sold as an individual purchase to Michael Mazzara, an executive at regional media company 6AM City. The sale price wasn’t disclosed, but it’s reported to have been six figures in dollars (tens of millions of yen), at a multiple of 3.7x revenue. What Johnson had originally pictured when he started was, in his own words, “I’d be thrilled if I could build something that made even $1,000 or $2,000 a year.” The result landed at hundreds of times that figure.

16 Years, by the Numbers

Really Only Two Growth Tactics

What the source describes as growth tactics is remarkably sparse. One: patiently reaching out to online running clubs and getting club organizers to post links to the site’s race information. Listings and backlinks grew simultaneously, and since the community itself was doing the posting, Johnson’s own workload, if anything, went down. It’s a design that made user contributions do double duty, for information gathering and for SEO, at once.

The other: an unexpected feature by The New York Times, which linked back to the site from within an article. That gave rankings and credibility a sudden boost. But this wasn’t a tactic that could be deliberately engineered — it arrived on its own, the result of years of being “the definitive site” in this space.

Structurally, this breaks down into three success factors. A large volume of queries with clear search intent, of the “half marathon + place name” shape. Races happen every year, so information never goes stale, and every update compounds search value. And runners have heavy adjacent spending (shoes, gear, travel) so ad rates aren’t bad. A “calendar-type” site that organizes structured information (events, deadlines, locations) is one of the most replicable patterns among niche sites. Because accuracy and comprehensiveness are what matter most, it’s also relatively easy to differentiate from mass-produced AI content.

Reading Between the Numbers: The Money Was Made in “Operating,” Not “the Sale”

The most instructive thing about this case is that against $1.2M in cumulative revenue, the sale price stayed at six figures. Even if the sale price landed at the very top of that six-figure range, the amount earned from 16 years of operation was far larger. Most of a calendar-type site’s value, then, lives in the cash flow during the holding period. The sale is ultimately just “one last collection.” If you’re choosing a business by the glamour of its exit, this type isn’t for you. Conversely, if your premise is holding long and steadily collecting, few types offer numbers this predictable.

The 3.7x-revenue multiple is also best read not as valuation of some standout mechanism, but as compensation for 16 years of update history and domain trust. Buyer Mazzara is an individual with media-operations expertise, and he essentially bought “a finished niche media property” as an asset. As with the individual-to-individual sale of Root + Revel, what’s confirmed here again is a market where established niche sites are routinely traded as “assets an individual buys and operates.”

The Hard Parts and Structural Risks

Behind the flashy cumulative figure, the weaknesses come through clearly in the source material too. First, revenue was almost entirely on one leg: AdSense. There’s none of the sales effort affiliate marketing requires, but there’s also no lever to pull against swings in ad rates or algorithm changes. That peak of $130K+ a year was itself a number sitting on a variable Johnson couldn’t control himself.

Next, burnout. What prompted the sale was not the business hitting a wall but the fading of Johnson’s own enthusiasm after 16 years. Updating 2,500 race listings every single year compounds in value, but it’s also labor you can’t step away from. And the sale process itself was grueling, Johnson looked back on it saying, “selling a business is a marathon, not a sprint.” Even with a broker walking alongside him, the negotiation clearly took its toll.

The Asset He Didn’t Sell: Keeping the Newsletter

While letting go of the site, Johnson pulled the newsletter, “The Half Marathoner,” out of the sale and kept it for himself. With over 50,000 subscribers, several hundred of them paid, he says that after moving it to Substack it “became a business in its own right.” He’d grown tired of running a site for search traffic, but his enthusiasm for writing directly to readers hadn’t faded. This split shows there’s a way to sell that isn’t a binary choice between selling the whole business or keeping it whole. You can divide the assets and keep only the part your enthusiasm still holds up.

Conditions and Limits of Replication

Japan has plenty of calendar-type queries too, “marathon race schedule,” “fireworks festival dates,” “market/flea-market vendor recruitment.” What generalizes is the design: pick a genre with structured information x annual update demand x heavy adjacent spending, and build a funnel where the information owners (organizers, communities) want to post it themselves. That it can be started while keeping a day job is also a proven advantage of this type.

There are also elements that don’t transfer. A stroke of luck like the NYT backlink can’t be planned for. English-language AdSense rates run higher than Japanese-language rates, so the same pageviews won’t translate to the same revenue level. And above all, the core of this case is the 16 years. This is a story of grinding out unglamorous updates for a decade-plus until the compounding kicked in, not one of hitting ¥180M in three years. Whether you can endure that stretch of time is, in practice, the real barrier to entry.

Related Reading

• Own The Yard — a comparable sale of an unglamorous niche-plus-SEO site
• Root + Revel — an individual-to-individual site handover