So last week I broke a good story — about the Hong Kong judge labelling Mokotedi Mpshe’s use of a 2002 judgment of his without attribution in the statement dropping charges against Jacob Zuma — and my page traffic and unique users went through the roof. Read the original blog by clicking here. After a bit of canny marketing (i.e. letting people I know at IOL, The Times and Politicsweb about the story), I did more in a day than I did in the previous two weeks. Great stuff (and I was mightily chuffed). It wasn’t a hard story to do. It took some time tracking down the judge through his Oxford University alumni and then filling him in on what was potting in SA, but these are all skills I picked up as a salaried hack. I intend to keep doing original content but the tricky thing for a small fry like me is the marketing.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

So what’s your website or blog worth? What the suckers with the money are prepared to pay, you might think. Well, maybe not. I’ve found a fascinating real time estimator of website values based on mathematical algorhythms called Stimator that chomps info from your websites (i.e. referrals from various sources)  and mixes it up with other economic stuff  I don’t pretend to understand. What’s so much fun about it is that in under a minute it  gives you a_ value — in US dollars nog al.

A half  hour of noodling around with South african URLs on Stimator’s calculator produced these results — and some  are mighty surprising. Of the big four news websites — IOL, News24, the Mail & Guardian and The Times — IOL came tops and the M&G second but News24 and The Times were beaten by the Daily Dispatch’s website (in East London). Here are the estimations done on 24 March:

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Popularity: 5% [?]