[matt1]

At the time of the acquisition the site made money in two ways:

1. Affiliate sales: when you click on a domain and register it through GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc, I get a % of the purchase price.

2. Premium accounts: Lean Domain Search only showed the top 150 results for free. You could pay $79 once for two months of access or $199/year for access to all 5,000 results.

Each was bringing in around $1,000-$1,500/month with the premium accounts growing quickly.

After the acquisition, we made the site free but left the affiliate links in place. The site has grown a lot since then [1] but the affiliate revenue still brings in the same $1,000 - $1,500/month because GoDaddy (the main driver of affiliate revenue) made some changes to its affiliate program that led to lower payouts.

[1] http://mattmazur.com/2015/07/03/lean-domain-search-at-3%C2%B...