What are the most expensive websites ever designed?
These can be recent websites or websites designed in the past.
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M$3 Answers
1. The estimated net worth or value of the website; calculated from the number of daily traffics, number of contents, and number of unique features of the website.
2. The money spent on building the website.
3. The cost to purchase the domain name (i.e Business.com).
From the net worth aspect, here's the top 5 most valued website :
1. Google.com - $29,474,299,422
2. Yahoo.com - $18,551,630,085
3. Amazon.com - $11,501,285,068
4. MySpace.com - $7,122,577,773
5. eBay.com - $5,622,551,932
As for the aspect of the cost from building the website, there are no valid data that could tell the exact spending of the website. This is because of the fact that almost all of the websites on the Internet didn't publish their expenditure data for the public.
However, I've managed to make an estimation of the total cost for the most expensive website in the world, Google. The cost will includes the purchase of the servers and headquarters. Note that the cost is just an estimate I personally counted from different sources of data on the Internet. Here is the calculation :
Headquarters : $319 million
Data Centers (with about 1,827,200 servers) : $913 million
Total : $1,232,000,000
Lastly, from the aspect of the domain name cost, here are the list of top 5 most expensive domain names :
1. Insure.com, sold to QuinStreet for $16 million in 2009.
2. Sex.com, sold for $12-$14 million in 2006.
3. Fund.com, sold for $9.99 million in 2008.
4. Porn.com, sold for $9.5 million in 2007.
5. Business.com, sold for $7.5 million in 1999.
Hope it helps! :)
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M$
Recovery.gov website is being redesign with a 18 million budget.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/07/18m-being-spent-to-redesign-recoverygov-web-site.html
http://www.charlottedesignblog.com/post/US-Government-is-spending-2418-Million-dollars-on-a-website-I-will-do-it-for-FREE!.aspx
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M$
I don't know if this is what your looking for but here it goes.
This year in Portugal we're celebrating the 100th anniversary of the implementation of the Republic. To celebrate this, the government made several things, one of them was the "Portal of the Centenary of the Republic".
This one made a big fuss in the media because of the costs involved and because they didn't made a public consult to see if someone hade a better price for it...
The site is this: http://www.centenariorepublica.pt/
The cost was: 99.500,00 €
And it was developed by one of the most famous designer in Portugal, Henrique Cayatte.
The site was made on Drupal, and in my opinion, it's not worth the price... Drupal is free, but it could have lots of code implementation on it, but it doesn't seem that this is the case, and most of the price was for the design, which in my opinion, isn't that great...
http://www.base.gov.pt/_layouts/ccp/AjusteDirecto/Detail.aspx?idAjusteDirec... -> the government site that has all the costs;
http://www.kerodicas.com/noticias/artigo=28553 -> a public blog relating the story
It was also present in newspapers and emails.
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M$
I should have been more specific. I am not after the 'net worth' of a web company or the 'domain value'.
What I am looking for are website projects that were designed with a big budget. The actually budget for the design and development. If the 'most expensive' cant be found then just a collection of websites that had big development and design budgets.
For example I remember reading there was a large amount of money spent on the recent whitehouse.gov website redesign.
I see. In that case, the answer will be Google. There's no available data that tells the exact amount of Google spending in the design but they've spent hundreds of millions dollars to build the servers on their data centers. It's also unknown how much exactly they spent on building servers but with about 1,827,000 servers in their data centers and an average $500 per servers, it would cost them about $913 million.
I've added an additional source that will covers the hardware overall of a single data center : http://storagemojo.com/2008/10/12/building-a-18-exabyte-data-center/
The total server counts is from : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/22/google_the_server_chip_designer/
And as a last note, these counting are just an estimate that's personally counted by me and the actual development cost will be different since it's never publicly released by Google.
Thank you, you get points for your effort, but the recovery.org example is more in line with what im after.
if you cant find exact amounts, an article that simply says 'this webdesign will run into the millions' will do
Again it doesn't have to be THE most expensive, any data on webdesign that in the million plus range would be great. there has to be more data out there....
Alright then, if that's the case, I've found several sites that cost millions of dollars as well. It's not as much as the Recovery.gov but it's surely very expensive for most people.
1. Dcita.gov.au - $4 Millions. Source : http://whirlpool.net.au/news/?id=1107
2. GOP.com - $1.4 Million. Source : http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/34992_GOP_Spent_More_Than_a_Million_Dollars_to_Launch_a_Disastrous_Website
3. MoFo.com - $1 Million. Source : http://www.myshingle.com/2010/02/articles/marketing-making-money/a-million-dollar-website/
That's all the sites I could find. I'm pretty sure that there are much more websites out there that cost a lot more than these sites but too bad they have hid their spending.
As for the collection of big development and design budgets websites, I can only gather the list of websites that are "look expensive to build" because of their beautiful design. This is because of the fact that almost all websites hide their budgets on their website development.
Here are they :
http://ansblog.com/2009/11/most-beautiful-best-website-design/
http://dzineblog.com/2009/06/50-beautiful-website-designs-for-your-inspiration.html
http://www.harrenmedianetwork.com/
http://www.sitesketch101.com/beautiful-websites