I just caught word that CashQuests.com has been sold for $15,000.

For some time now, many people have wondered whether Kumiko Suzuki was for real. We questioned whether the person behind the money-making blog was male or female. We questioned whether the person running the blog was really just a middle-aged man in Arkansas pretending to be a pretty Japanese girl in hopes of making a big splash in the ‘make money online’ blogosphere. Naturally, the geeky guys on the Internet are much more attracted to pretty girls than they are to fat slobs who enjoy World of Warcraft. After all of this controversy, we still don’t know and it looks like we will never know.

If you hop on over to sitepoint, you’ll find that CashQuests.com was placed in their marketplace and it was sold for $15,000. As it stands, the blog makes over $1,300 a month, so the new owner should be able to recoup the expense within about a year.

You’ve probably noticed that Kumiko Suzuki has been slowly removing herself from the site. Do you remember when the quest was taking place on Blogspot and it was actually called Kumiko’s Cash Quest? Do you remember the “peace sign” photograph, the only picture that we have ever seen of the elusive Kumiko? Here, let me refresh your memory:

Kumiko Suzuki

That was when Beyond the Rhetoric was a featured ad on her site. In fact, the skyscraper banner was the first of several ads by Kumiko.

After moving over to her (his?) own domain at cashquests.com, the transformation continued. The picture of Kumiko was removed. The color scheme switched from the girly-girl pink to orange, and then it changed again to red. I talked a bit about this transformation four months ago, clearly noting that Kumiko was removing herself from the site, presumably with the intention of selling Cash Quests somewhere down the line. (Foreshadowing, anyone?) Soon after, the byline disappeared, effectively creating an anonymous blog. At that point, Kumiko ceased to exist.

Cash Quests went from a sea of pink with a personal (although possibly fake) touch to what it is today:

cashquest-newdesign.jpg

Interestingly, there is no mention of the sale on the Cash Quests site itself. The way I found out was through this post by Jane May. Ironically, my dot com pho buddies were discussing Jane May just this past Saturday. We wondered what happened to Jane, because she hasn’t blogged in such a long time and then as soon as she re-emerges in the blogosphere, she breaks this huge story. Welcome back, Jane! We missed you. 🙂

As for Cash Quests, there’s no word on who the new owner is and so it’ll be interesting to see if there will be any changes implemented to the site. If the sale of Career Ramblings is any indication, the new owner of Cash Quests will keep things pretty much the way they are. Best of luck to both the new owner and Kumiko Suzuki, even if the latter isn’t a real person.