From today’s PE weekly . . .

Austin Ventures has sponsored a recapitalization of CreditCards.com, an online destination for consumers to search, compare, and apply for credit cards. No financial terms were disclosed. In related news, former Bankrate CEO Elisabeth DeMarse was named company CEO. American Capital Strategies and CreditCard.com founder Dan Smith also participated in the recap. www.creditcards.com

Wow . . . who knew anaffiliate spammer, keyword arbitrage, click arbitrage, traffic arbitrage, consumer information portal could get a top tier VC’s attention . . .

Actually, I’m just being facetious, I’m playing with internet marketing right now and do realize their value to advertisers and customers . . . In many way these are pretty legitimate businesses that provide value to the consumers much like an online equivalent of a distributor or retailer . . . providing breadth of SKU’s and enabling choice . . . its just interesting how the most important asset of the company is the URL . . . plus trying to understand what is Austin’s exit strategy . . . cause there are actually thousands of topic oriented sites with the same traffic like creditcards.com that Austin can build an entire practice around . . .