Ruki: Selling a Personal Blog for ¥2.8M — a Seller's Full Walkthrough of a Brokered Site M&A in Japan

There is, in fact, an active market for buying and selling personal blogs in Japan. But most closed deals are processed as “undisclosed listings,” and it is rare for a seller to put both the price and the process on the record. Ruki (X: @rukiblog123) sold her personal blog for ¥2.8 million in 2023 through the site-M&A brokerage Saitoma, and in November 2025 published the whole story on note: the fields she filled in on the appraisal form, the tempo of exchanges with her account manager, how the interviews with three buyer candidates ran, the price negotiation, and the moment “the amount minus fees was wired in one lump” the day after the buyer’s final inspection passed. It is one of the few first-person, seller-side records of what brokered site M&A actually looks like from the inside.

A caveat up front: the article discloses neither the blog’s niche, nor its monthly revenue, nor its page views. In that sense there is no way to verify what earnings multiple ¥2.8 million represents. We cover it anyway because the process resolution, what actually happens when an individual sells a site through a broker, is exceptionally high for publicly available information.

The sale, step by step

What the brokerage model buys you

Site sales in Japan split into marketplace-style platforms, where seller and buyer deal directly, and full-support brokerages that sit in the middle. Saitoma, Ruki’s choice, is a textbook example of the latter: in exchange for a retainer plus success fee, it takes on writing the listing copy, sourcing and screening buyers, moderating the interviews, providing contract templates, and arranging migration. Her reason for choosing this model was plain — “I had zero knowledge of how to move a website.”

What effectively set the price was the hearing sheet recording monthly PV and revenue. “This becomes the basis for the final appraisal,” she writes, and organizing the historical data took more time than anything else. The pricing moment is interesting: against the fair value computed from the sheet, her account manager proposed “given the support period and other factors, why not challenge a higher number”, and she accepted. Drawing the line for how aggressive an individual seller can afford to be is one of the things the fee actually pays for.

The contractual form is also characteristic of the brokerage model. The agreement with Saitoma is an exclusive mandate, no parallel use of other brokers, signed via CloudSign, with a retainer paid before the process ramps up. The listing’s PR copy was written by a dedicated writer after an interview. Ruki credits it with “expressing appeal I hadn’t seen in my own blog,” while also noting that appraisal-to-listing took several weeks, “I remember thinking it takes quite a while.” The design trades speed for thoroughness.

That said, the listing did not get immediate traction. For about a month there were no inquiries, and she candidly admits worrying about the silence. She kept updating the blog while waiting. Once the first candidate appeared, she interviewed three in sequence. The buyer she signed with was the third, who negotiated the price down during the interview. She accepted, and ¥2.8 million is the landing point of that negotiation.

What buyers were really evaluating

The most instructive part of the interview record is what all three buyer candidates checked. All three rated her topic-sourcing and monetization funnel highly, and all three worried about the same things: “can I reproduce this operating style myself?” and “can I secure the working hours?” What a buyer purchases is not past performance but the prospect that revenue continues after handover. Ruki also records the seller’s dilemma: overselling ease would be a lie, stressing difficulty would scare the buyer. After signing, the buyer did in fact get cold feet during handover. The broker’s manager followed up by phone, the anxiety was identified, manuals were expanded, and the transfer completed. That the price and closability of a site hinge on how person-independent it is matches what the buyer’s side reports in this account of acquiring a 550-article blog.

Her observations about the buyer pool are concrete too. What surprised her most was that people with no blogging experience at all were eager acquirers: for someone starting out, buying “a business that already produces profit” beats building from zero, a view of the demand side she only saw by sitting in the seller’s chair. At contract time, the broker supplied the template, a lawyer was available if needed, and evidence data for revenue plus analytics permissions had to be handed over, “the to-do list suddenly exploded,” she writes.

Limits of this record

Three caveats. First, as noted, the blog’s actual revenue is undisclosed, so the fairness of ¥2.8 million cannot be externally verified. Second, this memoir was written about two years after the sale, and Ruki now works as a certified partner of Saitoma (earning referral commissions). The article states the experience predates the certification and involved no special treatment, but a structural bias toward a favorable view of the broker should be discounted for. Third, the retainer amount and fee rate are not disclosed.

Even so, few individual exit stories disclose the process at this granularity. Set against direct-negotiation exits like Lea’s transfer of a LINE-commerce tool to a buyer found through an online community or Wararii!, an indie comedy-show search service sold to a company, the brokered route emerges clearly as the option where you pay time and fees to outsource negotiation, migration, and buyer aftercare.

What generalizes, and what doesn’t

Three things generalize: for an individual site sale, well-kept monthly PV and revenue data become the foundation of the appraisal. The records are an asset even if you never sell. What buyer candidates verify is reproducibility, so operating manuals and handover arrangements decide whether deals close. And for sellers inexperienced in migration and negotiation, a full-service broker can be worth its fees.

As for limits: at the ¥2.8 million scale, only the seller can weigh the net proceeds after retainer, fees and handover effort against the revenue of simply continuing to run the site. The experience also dates from 2023, and the author herself notes the service “may have changed in places.” The right way to read this record is as a template of the process, not of the price.