Update: The move comes scant months after FiLife head Ezra Kucharz left in January for CBS (NYSE: CBS) with praise from IAC and DJ for growing the site. They credited him publicly for turning around the site during his year-plus term as president and GM and building it to the #4 personal finance site with 4.4 million unique visitors in December. That growth evaporated almost immediately, dropping to 3.2 million in January and 3.08 million in February. It got worse. By this March, according to numbers provided by comScore (NSDQ: SCOR), FiLIfe.com was down to 322,000—a nearly 90 percent decline in just one month.

Worldwide unique visitors:
 

U.S. unique visitors:

What happened? One persistent suggestion from anonymous tipsters, from people familiar with FiLife at various stages and from others building sites not competing with FiLife, is that the site was buying traffic to boost growth numbers and when it stopped, so did the growth. One source with considerable experience in building traffic and familiarity with FiLife pulled up Compete’s numbers and said: “That is not the way an organically growing web site acts, assuming these numbers are remotely close to being accurate.” 

Compete’s actual numbers vary from comScore’s but the picture is the same:

A digital media exec pulled up Alexa.com to take a look and pointed to the relative lack of movement in pageviews per users during the traffic spike: “It’s not qualified traffic, it’s one page and gone.” This exec isn’t a personal finance competitor but was frustrated by the earlier bragging about traffic growth.

IAC has declined comment on any of the details about FiLife. I can’t say conclusively that’s what was happening but it would explain the traffic drama. If you have any info that would help me better understand how FiLife flamed out, please feel free to e-mail me.