The world's most expensive web sites?

I think I'm turning into Angry of Tooting as a couple of stories had me choking on my tea late last week. First off was the bafflingly high cost of the EU scampering after the Web 2.0 Strategists with their Facebook for MEPs which is coming at the bargain price of 3.2 million UKP. I beg your pardon? How much? Why copy an existing idea and build it yourself at great expense? What's the point of that?

You can probably think of similar examples where someone has basically borrowed an idea - say a community/networking site - and set their own up for a much smaller audience at great expense. And then wondered why it was languishing.

But that figure is nothing compared to the BBC overspend on web sites - which is a mere 36 million. Mind you - still better value than Jonathon Ross if you ask me.

You'd think these days that web sites would be getting easier and cheaper to produce. Or at least they should be.