Ms. Fehrenbacher

Alert! Disclosure! This reporter wrote some freelance posts for Inhabitat back in the days when it was an upstart labor of love by founder Jill Fehrenbacher (who happens to be married to web mogul Peter Rojas, co-founder of Gizmodo, Engadget and gdgt) and a cabal of far-flung writers with various environmental and design passions. Inhabitat covers advances in sustainable design and nifty products, and included the adorable spin-off Inhabitots as well as the green fashion blog Ecouterre, both of which will also roll into acquiring L.A.-based media company Internet Brands. Inhabitat has two million unique monthly visitors who look at 10 million pages a month.

Ms. Fehrenbacher will stay on as editor and publisher. "I will be staying on as manager of Inhabitat, and our entire editorial team will be staying on with me as well, so the only changes you can expect to see to our website are long-overdue improvements in our design, user-experience and page-load time (it’s about time, right?)" Ms. Fehrenbacher wrote in an email to readers. "We’re not planning any changes to the focus of our editorial--and with more resources, we’ll be able to produce more content, better content, and build out community features which will allow for greater participation of readers in the conversation."

The price is undisclosed. But this goes to show, editorial web startups are viable in world web 2.0. Inhabitat's revenue comes from advertising and sponsored content, newsletter placement and more "creative" efforts such as design contests. Also, we love the name "Internet Brands"--that company, which started as CarsDirect.com in 1998, operates more than 95 consumer websites in different categories, and operates the forum platform vBulletin as well as Wikitravel.