Wellness Blog Root + Revel Passes from One Individual to Another: An Everyday Scene from the "Used-Blog Market"

What Happened

Root + Revel is a holistic wellness blog (natural-living health, food, and home content) that Kate Kordsmeier started in Atlanta in 2015. It reached readers through SEO, Pinterest, and an email newsletter with recipes, product reviews, and articles on improving one’s health, monetized through ads and affiliate links. Kordsmeier had spent roughly a decade as a freelance writer before starting it, and in her own words, roughly summarized: she began it thinking she’d found her final career (“selling it was never remotely on my mind.” In December 2021, the blog was transferred) not to a large company, but to an individual buyer with a registered-dietitian credential, Sarah Ware.

The scale is worth pinning down in numbers. At the time of sale, the email list stood at about 10,000 subscribers, and monthly pageviews peaked at 200,000. Cumulative revenue from launch to sale had reached $700,000 (about ¥100M). The sale price itself was undisclosed, but source outlet They Got Acquired describes it as “six figures” (over $100,000). The deal was brokered by Chelsea Clarke’s blog-specific marketplace, BlogsForSale.co. After deducting the marketplace’s fee and a flat legal fee, the seller’s net take-home was about 70% of the sale price.

Six Years, a Timeline

Letting Go of a “Final Career”

Kordsmeier’s reasons for letting go stack up threefold. First, by around four years in, her enthusiasm for running it had faded. In her own words: “I just didn’t have the energy anymore. I looked at the blog and realized I’d said what I needed to say.” Second, as she kept running it, her own views on health and wellness had shifted, and no longer matched the article base that was driving the revenue. Ironically, the highest-earning content on the site was a guide to organic meat-delivery services — a structural twist between the writer’s current thinking and her revenue source. Third, she had a child and wanted to shift toward a business that demanded less of her.

What’s notable is that at first, she only saw two options: “keep going” or “shut it down.” Learning that a market for buying and selling blogs existed is what surfaced a third option. An asset that would otherwise have simply gone to ruin got an exit that matched a track record of roughly ¥100M in cumulative earnings, just from learning that market existed. That information gap is the heart of this case.

The Solo Sale Attempt Failed First

Easy to overlook, but this sale stumbled once before it worked. Kordsmeier initially tried finding a buyer herself, with no broker. The result: months of silence, no offers, and during that stretch, revenue from a site she’d already emotionally checked out of kept declining. A vicious cycle where the very thing being sold loses value while the sale drags on.

The turning point was connecting with Chelsea Clarke, who runs the blog-sale marketplace BlogsForSale.co. Clarke is a broker who has closed over $2M in cumulative site sales and runs a curated model, screening the listings on her platform. Individual blog buyers exist scattered across the world, but a seller finding one alone is hard. There’s inherent value in simply being listed where buyers gather. A 30% cut for fees and legal costs isn’t cheap, but weighed against the opportunity cost of “revenue melting away for months while unsold” on her own, it’s more than enough justification. Kordsmeier also said the process of letting go was more emotional than she expected, leaving the words: “coming to terms with the unknown, and finally being able to let go.” The costs here aren’t only administrative.

“The Deals That Never Make the News” Are the Real Market

This case is flashy in neither price nor scale. But that is exactly why it’s worth recording. Media M&A coverage skews toward big-ticket deals, yet most of the actual market consists of everyday transactions like a used-housing market: one individual buys the blog another individual built, and keeps it running.

For the seller, it means a blog you’ve lost interest in (or that no longer fits your life priorities) can be cashed out instead of left to rot. For the buyer, it means starting blog operations from a “nearly-new property” that comes with domain authority, an existing article base, and a revenue track record. This deal’s buyer, Ware, is a registered dietitian, someone with wellness-field expertise buying a property that was already running, instead of building search authority from zero. Pouring your own expertise into a site with a track record is faster than spending a year building SEO from scratch. The buyer’s math holds up too.

Reading It in Reverse, as a Buyer

Flip this case around and it says: besides “building” a blog or media property, there is “buying” one. In Japan too, sites in the hundreds-of-thousands-of-yen range change hands routinely on Rakko M&A, and buying a site with proven revenue and improving it is quietly becoming standard practice in both the English-speaking and Japanese-speaking worlds.

For due diligence as a buyer, our archive of exit case studies works as a reverse index, once you know what sellers use as “materials to sell high” (disclosing problems, migration support…), you also know what to verify as a buyer.

The take-home shrank by 30%, and the sale story became the sign over her next coaching business

There’s a reverse side to these numbers too. Start with the take-home shrinkage: fees and legal costs ate up about 30% of the sale price. In individual-to-individual deals, the gap between the headline sale price and what actually lands in your pocket isn’t negligible.

Next, founder-dependence risk. Part of the reason for this sale was “a mismatch between the owner’s values and the revenue-generating content.” Flip that around, and it means a blog whose readers are attached to the owner’s personal beliefs or voice may not be guaranteed to keep earning the same revenue after ownership changes. The buyer inherits the peak-200,000-monthly-pageview traffic built on SEO and Pinterest, but inherits the search-algorithm-volatility risk wholesale along with it. And because the sale price was only disclosed as a “six-figure” range, there’s no way to benchmark what multiple of annual revenue it sold for. It should be stated plainly: you cannot read a price benchmark out of this case.

One more caveat about the post-sale narrative. Kordsmeier now runs a coaching business (Success With Soul Incubator) that uses Root + Revel’s track record as its calling card, teaching people how to build online businesses. In other words, this sale story is also, for its subject, marketing material for her next product. It’s valuable as a first-hand account, but the fact that the telling has a structural incentive to lean toward “selling was a good choice” is something readers should correct for.

Related Reading

• Rakko M&A’s closed deals — Japan’s “used-blog market”
• Honeymoons.com — an upper-tier exit in the same genre