Googling my name, which I do once in a while when I’m fidgety, I came across website outlook, a site which purports to tell you how much your website is worth. And, according to them, marga.org, my main personal website, is worth $6,000. Meanwhile, voxpublica.org, where this blog is kept, is worth a little over $2K. Aha.
It’s not clear what they base these values on. The only data they give about the websites are the daily pageviews, which I have no idea how they think they can figure out. Their number for marga.org, a little under 2K, is about 60% less than what I actually get, about 3300 for February 2010. Voxpublica.org, of course, gets many fewer hits, but still more than they give it credit for.
I imagine their valuing of the website is based on its potential ad revenue – but that’s a very silly valuation. For one, it forgets the value of the domain name alone. marga.org doesn’t have much going for it as a domain name, beyond being my name and it being short and somewhat easy to spell (though not to pronounce in English). voxpublica.org may have a higher value just because there is an online magazine in norway that might want the name and because it’s a domain name that could work for many sorts of endeavors in any part of the western world. I got it originally to provide hosting for other human rights organizations – though I never used it for that purpose. I do like the domain name, though, so I’m keeping it.
But also, how much traffic you get depends on what you put on the website. I have to admit that some of my highest traffic pages are old pages. For example, my most visited content page in marga.org is the one for my recipe for yassa, which has been in my website for as long as I’ve had it. But my blog post on safeway birthday cakes, which I wrote in 2008, gets lots and lots of hits as well. And, personally, I have no idea what things that I post will generate a lot of traffic (or make it to the top of the search engines).
In any case, it’s nice to know that I’m worth something šŸ˜‰