A Completely Specious Look at Your Blog's Value

   
    My
blog
is worth $88,068.24.
How
much is your blog worth?

See the
widget above? I got it from the Business Opportunities
Weblog, which was linked in from a bunch of places today. It
says that this here Magic Smoke blog is worth a cool 88
large.

How'd they determine that number?
Let's back up a step.

As you
recall, about two weeks ago, AOL announced that it was buying Weblogs, Inc., a blog
content network of about 80 blogs, including Engadget, Slashfood and Luxist.




I hadn't talked about it here to date because there's not going to be
a

lot that really impacts the regular Journaler. (You'll probably start

seeing more contextual content links to blogs in the Weblogs, Inc.

network, but that's about it.)

(Incidently, I'm
going to keep referring to it as the Weblogs, Inc. network, because
there's another company called Weblogs [no Inc.], and they
got bought by VeriSign
shortly after the Weblogs, Inc. deal. The two companies do completely different things.)

Anyway, the price that
AOL paid was reported in the press as anywhere from $20 to $40
million (don't ask me, because I don't know).


Using those numbers as a baseline, an intrepid blogger,
Tristan Louis,
counted the number of links to each blog as listed by Technorati, then crunched
some numbers to figure out the value
of the deal on a per-link basis. 


For example,

if the acquisition price was $25 million dollars, and there were
44,276

links pointing to all the blogs in the Weblogs, Inc. Network, then the

price per link was $564.64.

Skip forward to now,
when blogger Dane
Carlson took the info that Mr. Louis did, and created a
widget


that looks at the number of links to your blog, then assigns a dollar

value to your blog based on the per-link value from the Weblogs, Inc.

deal, and outputs it in HTML code that you can paste into your
blog.

As I said in the header, it's a completely
specious
way of assigning a dollar value to your blog, but it is kind of fun. --
Joe