From New Zealand Taxi Driver to $5.2M Exit

How a New Zealand Retiree Sold AllAboutCookies.org for $5.2 Million

Imagine owning a website that commands links from titans like The New York Times, Amnesty International, and Spotify, then banking a multi-million dollar payout by selling it. But what if the person behind that story wasn’t a Silicon Valley veteran but a taxi driver from Auckland, New Zealand—someone whose first computer was a dusty Commodore 64, who knew nothing about DNS or Google AdSense, and who started with a $9,000 risk on an expired domain when domain parking was the wild west.

Humble Beginnings: A Taxi, a Family, and a Domain Gamble

Back in 2008, our protagonist (who stays anonymous to this day) was driving cabs for a living. He’d just found out he’d be a father, and the stress of building a nest egg got him scanning for opportunities on the side. Domain names at the time, especially expired ones, were often undervalued. Many were abandoned by companies too slow to notice their worth. When he stumbled on AllAboutCookies.org—once run by a European privacy outfit—he recognized the dormant value. Cookies, especially in the context of web privacy, still had a future, he believed. He bet big for his means: $9,000, at a time when most domains were snapping up for under $100. The original European company, astounded by his new-found ownership, even tried to buy it back as it began to attract traffic and backlinks again.

Early Moves: Content, Languages, and a SEO Jackpot

The website already had a solid backlink profile from its previous life. Instead of letting that go to waste, he preserved much of the old content and began translating the material into multiple European languages. This was ahead of the GDPR wave, and most webmasters reaching for an explanation about how cookies worked started linking back to AllAboutCookies.org. Over time, inbound links piled up. When Google still displayed their famed "PageRank" publicly, the site boasted a massive PR of 9 out of 10. Organic authority didn’t just come from clever SEO—he’d positioned the site perfectly as the go-to resource for cookie policy explanations. Suddenly, IT professionals, marketers, HR teams, and small businesses across the EU referenced his work.

Passive Revenue, Google AdSense—And Big Trouble

The site wasn’t a cash cow in the beginning, but earning $100 per day passively while driving a taxi was decent pocket money. But life on the internet is rarely simple. Traffic kept surging, and with it, problems. A US Fortune 500 company unleashed a torrent of spammy sites, generating fake links and traffic. Google’s automated systems noticed, firing off AdSense warnings, then suspensions. Each time this happened, the founder would try to block IP addresses, clean up traffic, and appeal for restoration—sometimes successfully, sometimes locked out entirely. Eventually, the account was permanently banned.

Instead of throwing in the towel, he recruited analytics and security experts to dig deep. They exposed the invalid traffic sources, formulated a technical solution, and then mounted a detailed protest to Google. A week later, remarkably, his AdSense was back online. This decisive moment could have ended the story. Instead, it juiced the next phase of growth.

Surprise Upside: Less Traffic, Triple the Revenue

The weirdest part? When his traffic finally normalized—purged of bots and spam—the earnings shot up. Advertisers saw only authentic viewers, leading their bids per click to spike. Where before he’d earned about $20,000 NZD per month, suddenly he was pocketing as much as $50,000/month. Sometimes, rates approached $12 NZD-per-click, which is stratospheric in the AdSense world. Legitimate global businesses continued referencing AllAboutCookies.org as the privacy law debate accelerated. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rolling in, and privacy rules landing hard in the US, the website was a magnet for businesses updating their cookie disclosures.

Exit Time: Selling to a US Publisher on Flippa

After nearly a decade-and-a-half of passive maintenance—mostly just checking stats and optimizing AdSense—the founder felt the pressure, the anxiety from fighting invalid traffic, begin to outweigh the fun. He’d made the site as dialed as possible for a solo operator. When Flippa entered the picture, it was time. With a stunning track record—267,000 monthly page views, over 50M organically acquired backlinks, 92% margin, and average revenues north of $56K/month—the site got scooped up by a US-based publisher. The price? About $5.2 million dollars. After taxes, life would never be the same for that Kiwi retiree.

What Made This Work: Timeliness, Authority & SEO

• He invested before cookie law awareness boomed, but had a hunch it’d become a hot topic
• Preserved and translated existing authority content so value was never lost
• Weathered multi-year Google AdSense frustrations with expert help
• Let the organic backlinks and passive nature of the business compound for over a decade
• Sold at a market peak, just as regulatory demand was transitioning from Europe to the US

What’s Next?

The seller now plans to build an island retreat in Vanuatu with his partner. The buyer, meanwhile, has an iconic, well-trafficked resource to further optimize and expand, especially as cookie and data privacy questions continue to climb. The tale shows you don’t have to be technical, just persistent, resourceful, and a bit bold at the right moments. Sometimes, even industry giants only realize what they had once it’s gone—sometimes, it’s your turn to make the score.