What is a website worth? Apparently as much as $18,000,000 if you are the US Government. The true irony? It is for a website devoted to tracking government spending. The site, recovery.gov, was created to track spending under the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. According to the Obama administration, the site was developed to provide the highest level of transparency and accountability to the American people. Recovery.gov “2.0” promises to give U.S. taxpayers more information about where their money is going. Well, one thing for sure, some of this money went to finance the most expensive website in the world!

The five year $18 million contract to redesign the recovery.gov website was granted to Smartronix, an IT firm with connections to Steny Hoyer, the House Majority Leader. What technology was used to upgrade and redesign this website? SharePoint! The recovery.gov site has actually received more than 200 votes to become one of the highest rated sites showcased on TopSharePoint.com.

When first launched, recovery.gov was relatively popular, receiving more than 150 million hits in its first month according to market research firm Alexa. Since then, the traffic has been going down and the site currently sits at 110,165 in Alexa’s traffic rankings and at 23,088 Traffic Rank in US.

So keep up your SharePoint skills! That, combined with government connections, may earn you millions.