Sam Parr tracks wealthy people through real-estate purchases on sites like TheRealDeal.com. He digs into Bryan Keringer, who founded Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, bootstrapped them in 1995, sold to IAC for $100 million in 2005, then sold Dictionary.com again to Dan Gilbert for $100 million. The sites pull 40 million monthly visitors and $20 million in annual revenue with just dozens of employees.
one interesting thing that I found. So what I like to do is I like to find out who is buying different parts of real estate or different real estate. So I go to therealedeal.com and there's this one segment called Yolanda Says. It's like this fake author named Yolanda. He goes, I heard a rumor that this person's buying a house. The owner is this, this, and this. Yolanda hears that they're going to offer this much money. I have no idea. Yolanda is a fake person, right? It's just like a blog, a blog, a gossip blog.
Yeah.
For real estate, mostly in New York and LA though. So they're kind of famous, famous e-purse people doing it. And what I love to do is find out who bought, who's buying the real estate, and then I go and research them. And the reason why is one of the best ways to figure out if someone's actually wealthy or not is by the real estate holdings that they own. That's one of the few things that it's really hard to fake. I mean, you could fake it, but if someone has bought a $20 million home, the likelihood that they're worth $100 million plus is incredibly high. You know, it's hard to like bullshit that, right? And so real estate holdings is one of the best ways to get an indicator of someone's wealth, or it's a great way, not the best way, but it's a great way. And I found one that interested me a ton. This guy's name was Bryan Keringer, and he bought a house in Malibu in 2019 for $20 million. I hadn't heard of Bryan. I know a lot of internet entrepreneurs. I hadn't heard of him, so I researched him. And this is the guy who started dictionary.com. Kind of a crazy thing when you think about it, because who really thinks of dictionary.com? So in the 1990s, this guy started, uh, in 1995, he started a business called Lexico Publishing, and Lexico Publishing owned thesaurus.com and dictionary.com, and he bootstrapped it and he grew it, and he sold it in 2005 to IAC for $100 million. And then, uh, 2 years ago, IAC sold dictionary.com to Dan Gilbert. You know Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans? Yep. He sold dictionary.com for, or they sold dictionary.com for $100 million. So they didn't do a very good job with it. But dictionary.com gets around 40— dictionary.com and thesaurus.com gets around 40 million uniques a month and does about $20 million in revenue. And they have barely any employees, I believe dozens of employees. It's incredibly fascinating because this is what I call—
how do they make money? It's just AdSense, or is there something else?
Just ads.
