A sports publisher backed with $77 million just acquired Mental Floss for its expertise in crushing Google search results

Mental Floss' website.

Mental Floss specializes in educational content for millennials.

• Minute Media wants to acquire a number of vertical-oriented media brands, starting with Mental Floss.
• About 65% of Mental Floss' traffic comes from search, according to SimilarWeb.
• Minute Media claims to reach 100 million monthly unique users through three sports sites.

Mental Floss has a new owner. The millennial-focused site founded by William E. Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudar as a campus magazine at Duke University in 2001 is now part of Minute Media, a seven-year old publishing company that focuses on sports.

Minute Media operates both a publishing and technology business, and is backed by $77 million in funding, $17 million of which it secured in May. Routman declined to name the cost of acquring Mental Floss.

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According to comScore, Mental Floss had roughly 8 million monthly unique visitors in August, up from seven million a year previously. Minute Media is buying the site from British magazine mogul Felix Dennis' estate. Dennis Publishing acquired the title in 2011. The process of buying the title took about 90 days, Routman said.

Minute Media is branching outside of sports

The company publishes three sports-oriented sites that collectively reach 100 million monthly unique visitors: 90min focuses on international soccer, DBTap covers esports and 12Up focuses on the US sports market.

"Obviously we have a little bit of wind on our back in light of the fact that it was a World Cup year that provides some positive momentum in the world of soccer," he said. "We felt that it was time to expand outside of sports and after doing a lot of testing over the past six months to see how compatible our tech and products were in facets other than sports we decided to enter the space - we think we found with Mental Floss we found another great leader in a vertical market with a differentiated audience that still caters to younger millennials."

In addition to Mental Floss' niche focus on knowledge about millennials, Minute Media was impressed with the site's website traffic and evergreen content - think lists with headlines like 11 things you should know about Rosh Hashanah or quizzes - that continually perform well within SEO.

Mental Floss has strong SEO chops

According to SimilarWeb, Mental Floss had 16.4 million monthly uniques in August with 65.5% of traffic coming from search. Social and direct traffic together made up another 29.6% of traffic.

"Mental Floss is not overly reliant on social channels - they do a great job in terms of organic traffic and great search density," Routman said. "The businesses that have to invest media dollars to grow audience we don't believe are sustainable."

Minute Media

Minute Media president Rich Routman.

Minute Media employs about 200 employees with 75 to 80 people working in editorial, 70 in tech and product and the rest of employees split between commerical, finance and human resources. Mental Floss will bring over all of its editorial staff led by editor in chief Erin McCarthy. While Minute Media does not plan to cut editorial staffers "there are other areas in tech, commercialization and marketing where we can apply central resources," Routman said.

Minute Media is also interested in other acquisitions, he said.

"Hopefully it serves as the first of several deals that we can bring into the family," he said. "As we look into other verticals, M&A is at the forefront of our strategy and we're already working on several other deals alongside Mental Floss - we think it's the right time to be a buyer and not a seller."

Minute Media is pushing in to licensing

Advertising makes up 70% of Minute Media's revenue while the other 30% comes from licensing, according to Minute Media president Rich Routman. The publisher licenses its CMS software to publishers like Turner's Brazilian TV network Esporte Interativo and HT Media in India.

Venturing into software as a revenue source is nothing new for publishers. Vox Media, The Washington Post and New York Media all make money from licensing their CMS to other publishers.

"If you're reliant 100% on advertising, it's more of a volatile market these days," Routman said.

Minute Media's CMS is specifically designed for freelancers and "content creators that are external to the newsroom." It also "integrates all sorts of third-party media templates so that you can have a variety of formats in your content creation process."