What Is Your Blog Worth?

There is a bit of blog silliness going around about valuing blogs based on Technorati Rank. I read about this first on Om Malik’s blog. You can see an example on the side ofPatrix’s Blog (the George Washington picture) and Technorati blog, (I might be the first to link to this sad blog). Apparently a big group of blogs was bought out for an outrageous price and Tristan Louis determined that at this price each link is worth somewhere around $564.

Now think about that. Did my five seconds of labor above create $564 in wealth to Patrix? Well, I had linked to him before, but what about Om Malik? This post on Desipundit would be worth easily $100,000 to the collective blogosphere. Obviously links cannot, in the margin, be worth anything because they are essentially costless to produce. You could hire people at not much cost to create blogs and link to other blogs and, in effect, “print up” links like counterfeit money all day long.

But it is something that lots of people thought enough about your blog to create a link to it, without any remuneration involved. That is the curious paradox here. The links are valuable because there is no market for them and they are scarce. If you could buy them, then they would be nearly worthless.

But maybe another way to think about it is that a link is valuable if it is in the context of a genuine article. If someone was inspired to write a genuine essay based on your piece, that is gold. But again, it is valuable only because that person had no incentive to do so besides his own admiration of your work.

While the Technorati metric works okay for now as a way of ranking blogs, it could easily be corrupted once people try to price a blog using this metric. Really, the only metric that matter is ad revenue.

But, for a week anyway, I will enjoy the thought that my humble blog is worth $61,500. Now that I have crossed the 100 link threshold, I want say "thank you" to everyone who has linked to my blog at some time:

• Marginal Revolution


• Middle Stage


• India Uncut


• Sometimes It's Peaceful


• Anyletter


• Jwaala


• Gongol


• Hot Topic Blogs - Obesity


• Jeff Moore


• Half Sigma


• Ceteris Paribus


• Carnival of the Capitalists


• Work In Progress


• Balancing Life


• Life - More or Less Live


• Kicking Over My Traces


• Marcd Out


• Desi Pundit


• Gaurav Sabnis


• Mandar Talvekar


• Polymath-Interested in Everything


• Saket Vaidya


• Patrix


• Suhail Kazi


• Madhu Nair


• The whole sort of general mishmash


• T. A. Abinandanan


• Anil Kandangath


• Suman Kumar


• Maobi Blogger


• G as in Good H as in Happy


• The Common Room


• My Own Thoughts


• Deba (Chennai)


• The Acorn (Nitin Pai)


• Deepak Sarda


• Charukesi Ramadurai


• Ash


• Srikanth


• Landfair Furniture


• Ravisez


• Kiran Babu


• Sepia Mutiny


• Anger Management


• Ashish Hanwadikar


• Anand of Locana


• Uma of Indiawriting


• Sourin Rao


• Curious Gawker


• Gautam Ghosh


• Sujatha of Blogpourri


• @mit


• Sonia Faleiro


• Kaps


• Rahul Anantharaman


• Dina Mehta


• Finland for Thought


• Musey Me


• Chandrachoodan Gopalakrishnan


• Granger Gab


• Sandeep Menon


• Saurabh Jayawant


• R. (Chennai)


• Jai Arjun


• Shrikanth


• Amodini


• Pankaj Shrivastav


• Anshul Kumar


• Truman


• Arzan Sam Wadia


• Chandon V


• Sybil of Indigo Warp


• Spanish in India


• The Mullers


• R&B


• Protea Spice


• Sujith Ramakrishnan


• Gold Coin Expert Heh


• The Arbit Council


• Harini Calamur


• Varun V Nair


• Sue at Dutch Diary


• Niket Kaisare


• Lively Debate


• Do Bato


• AIM - K


• State of the Nation


• Subha of Doodles


• Mrigatrishna


• Guru Subramanian


• Sakshi Juneja


• June of Utter Rubbish


• Ranjit Shinde


• Ravi of Carpe Diem


• Aditya Bidikar


• Yadunandan


• B.L. Ochman


• Sameer Marathe


• Marvel McCoy


• IIPM vs Bloggers


• Russell Degnan


• Ash


• Mostly Harmless


• Aishwarya of Dehli


• Rums of Life and Food


• Dipika of Kolkata


• Mihn-Duc Phan


• DP of DP's Blog


• Ravi (Gujarat)

(It feels nice to print up counterfeit money).