Chowhound.com was purchased for $10 million

The owner Jim Leff struggled for years making no money . He almost abandoned the site at one point but he kept it .  He got bought out by CNET .

Chowhound founder Jim Leff has said the community grew way beyond his expectations — in 2005 it had 15 million hits a month and 800,000 unique viewers — but the site had been operating in the red for years.

See http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2006/09/11/story6.html