How much do The Big Boys spend on Web Dev?

[AngelusWeb]

I was wondering --

What do you suppose Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or Borders spend on their websites per year?

Probably a lot more than $100,000, right?

[NogDog]

By the time you add in medical benefits and other overhead, they probably spend over $100,000/year per developer, not to mention the managers. I suspect Amazon, at least, has quite a few full-time web site developers, designers, and testers on their staff, plus whatever temporary contractors, out-sourced developers in India, etc. they may use as needed for various projects/updates.

[noahqw]

Amazon and Borders are in complete different price ranges when it comes to their websites. Amazon is defiantly spending much more!

[Dasher]

On the other hand with a site like Amazon a large portion of the web site is composed of simple data entry into the database all of the new products and price and/or description changes by lower paid staff.

The developers are making sure the database and underlying code work as expected.

[Jarrod1937]

If you just think about the servers and the cost to run the servers, they're well over $100,000 for just the servers. A company i know spends about $24,000 per year on just their server setup... and they're are a lot smaller than amazon. Bigger sites like amazon, facebook...etc require a complex system of failover and load balancing, usually to the point of having some servers dedicated to a single task on the website. I'm quite sure amazon is also doing database sharding with each shard on its on server setup (itself which is probably load balanced). So, they're spending a crap ton on their servers alone.
Next we have the design, which for most of us consist on a single individual running some designs by their boss, implementing them, then possibly A/B or multivariant testing them, then possibly running it by a makeshift user testing stage... However, amazon more than likely has a team for the design, some for artistic purposes, others for their usability and accessibility knowledge. Couple this together with market research, real user testing (eye tracking, conversion and efficiency measurements, the works) using actual paid individuals within their target market, and you have their design workflow.
Then you have the coders, which have to get their complex coding running on the complex server setup, as well as implementing all the new ideas amazon tries all the time (given to them by yet another team more than likely) and you have a very large expense on your hands.
I'd gather at a minimum, amazon spends around $2,000,000 on their site (including the people's wages and overhead as mentioned), but probably much more than that.