ValueClick's Investopedia Purchase May Bring More Financial Advertisers

ValueClick has purchased Investopedia from Forbes Media for $42 million, as the lead-gen network looks to offer marketers an audience of financial readers.

The 11-year-old Investopedia consists of approximately 30,000 pieces of evergreen financial content, while yearly adding around 7,000 items. It averages 2.2 million unique U.S. visitors per month, according to comScore. The financial content site offers free-to-use videos, tutorials, exam preparation tools, a dictionary, and other resources.

John Ardis, spokesperson for the Westlake Village, CA-based ValueClick, said Investopedia is the company’s first site that specifically targets the financial sector. He said its readership includes a mix of financial business professionals and investors who log on from their personal computers. While ValueClick wasn’t necessarily lacking financial-based ad clients, Ardis said, Investopedia should enhance its network offering for that niche.

“It’s an opportunity to continue to expand in that financial services arena with either potentially new or, in some cases, deeper relationships with financial services advertisers,” he said. “And it allows us to introduce our thousands of clients from other advertising sectors to Investopedia.”

Ardis said Investopedia’s operations in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, will continue to run normally and no layoffs are planned. He said that the site’s content will likely stay the same.

“I think if it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” Ardis said. “If anything, I think we’ll look at the assets ValueClick may have to help Investopedia continue to build out the great stuff they’ve done.”

Follow Christopher Heine on Twitter at @ChrisClickZ.