QuinStreet has been on the website purchasing prowl for a over a year now picking up mortgage, BtoB and now insurance related sites. The most recent acquisition was announced Friday and included the purchase of the domain insure.com and its content for $16m.

That is right $16m.

Now, I personally have seen QuinStreet make premium bids for properties, but this seems like more then just a premium. Here is a comparison of Insureme.com, netquote.com and the new Quinstreet property insure.com, courteous of Compete.com.

Here is the kicker:

“The Company (Life Quotes) will retain all of its remaining balance sheet assets, national brokerage contracts with 25 leading life insurance companies, 50 fully licensed insurance agents, call center operations, customer and prospect lists, and nearly all of its current inbound affiliate and traffic partnerships.”

QuinStreet is literally paying $16m for just the website, domain and with a little luck some organic traffic. Here is some of there current rankings for their top keywords:

Health Insurance Quotes: pg 4, #7
life insurance quotes: pg 1, #9
Home Insurance quotes: pg 1, #5
travel insurance quotes: not in the top 50
car insurance quotes: pg 3, #1

Nothing completely spectacular, however with a very strong  SEO push they can make some big improvements in the SERPs. Although, that goes without saying that they are competing for rankings in a very competitive landscape and the movements from the bottom of page 1 to the top of page 1 can be the most difficult moves. I am not a “domainer”, but doesn’t $16m seem a like too much for this site?

Here are the most recent and publically announced acquisitions by QuinStreet:

January 2008: SureHites
June 2008: VendorSeek
August 2009: Internet.com

Buy the way, I have a blog for sale with some pretty solid search rankings. It is on sale for only $1m cash. I will be waiting for the call.

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