How much money is there in the “Mac news” game?

My good friend Michael Johnston over at iPhoneAlley turned me on to a website that has me contemplating quitting my day job. CyberWyre is a site that can estimate the approximate value of your website by analyzing a number of factors – such as traffic levels and sources of potential income– and then spits out the approximate market value your site may be worth.

Well, needless to say, when I saw that Macenstein is now valued at $117,105, I nearly spilled my Doritos reaching for the phone to book my flight to Aruba.

Somewhat baffled by the apparent discrepancy between my site’s claimed net worth and the actual amount of income generated, I decided to check out some of the other notable Mac-related sites out there to see what their net worth was. Looks like I picked the right business!

Thinksecret.com ($ 1,110,799),
Macrumors.com ( $2,135,202),
Appleinsider.com, ($2,289,543).

WOW.

However, perhaps the granddaddy of all Mac sites is the Unoffical Apple Weblog (TUAW), with an approximate value of $23,534,026. It seems that reporting on Apple can potentially generate more money than Apple itself! (Hopefully this news doesn’t start contributors to those sites demanding raises, if not company jets).

Now, I was prepared to write the site off as complete BS (I mean, Google is good, but $3.3 trillion?), but I tried typing in another 10 or so sites I own (all of them basically worthless), and all of them returned the more reasonable $58 result that sites with no juice seem to, so obviously the site is using SOME sort of algorithm, however flawed.

But I think I’ll just go with the assumption that CyberWyre is dead-on accurate, and Macenstein is worth over $100k. It makes me feel better about wasting my free time on this site. And while I would hate to sell it, if any would-be investors are reading, I am willing to sell you Macenstein for the low low introductory price of $70,000, a savings of nearly 40% off the retail price! Act now, as supplies are limited!

So, how off do you think CyberWyre is? What about your site? Leave us your site’s value in the comments below. (Note: You can get slightly different values depending on how you enter your address. For instance, adding the “www” to the front of Macenstein.com got me an extra $2000!).

-The Doc