Internet Writer Has Opinion On Value Of Internet Website

Before the entire economy of Earth collapsed, online reporters who covered the exciting world of “blogs with banner ads” enjoyed speculating on the value of various websites run by a couple of clever weirdos here and there. Was Gawker Media worth more than General Electric? Had PerezHilton.com eclipsed Disney in valuation? Etc. Well, the economy must finally be “great again,” because there’s a new Business Insider post claiming Matt Drudge’s web page is worth “$150 million to $375 million.”

And those values, importantly, drastically understate the value that could be created if Matt Drudge decided to build it out into a more typical digital media business.

Indeed. And if Jesus of Nazareth had the use of a small plane during His brief ministry, how much bigger might Christianity be today?

I enjoy these articles specifically because I have repeatedly become a multi-millionaire thanks to my past ownership of a blog that made jokes about John McCain being old. Here is what Felix Salmon once wrote, back when the whole world was filthy rich and cocaine literally fell out of the sky onto the tongues of a happy humanity:

Assuming that Denton’s being smart, however — which is normally a reasonably safe assumption to make — this news is definitely a bad datapoint for anybody with dreams of becoming rich through blogging. Wonkette had 5.9 million pageviews and 1.5 million unique visitors in March: on the basis of the back-of-the-envelope calculations which have become increasingly commonplace in the blogosphere, it should have been worth an eight-figure sum.

Eight figures! How much is that, like … well, between $10 million and $99 million. So let’s say “$99 million,” to be on the safe side.

To be fair, Salmon ended that paragraph with, “Instead, it seems to be worth almost nothing.” Which was NOT true, but perhaps closer to the truth than $99 million. Anyway, let’s make the Drudge Report the publisher of the New York Times and also, uhh, Univision and World of Warcraft!