That’s how much an unnamed bidder has ponied up, via a Microsoft charity auction, for a look-see at Gates’s place. After the tour of the 48,000-square-foot complex, which is located outside Seattle on the shores of Lake Washington, the winner gets to nosh on some appetizers, TechFlash reports.

A year ago, the same tour, of the same house, fetched just $8,600. Go figure.

All of that is out of your price range? I understand. Here, for us proles, is a free, “virtual” tour of the place:

[Image credit: Tiktik]

But while Hearst isn’t ready to declare victory, it does say that the first two months of seattlepi.com’s life have been “encouraging.” Via a press release, Hearst offers up a bevy of traffic stats that show the site has grown even as its staff has shrunk. Hearst doesn’t offer up any info about revenue, but does say that its “sales and marketing team is highly energized.”

I sincerely hope so, and I sincerely hope it works. I still don’t get the math: Hearst says seattlepi.com is attracting 4.3 million monthly unique visitors. Chris Batty, who runs sales for Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire, figures that traffic could support a staff of perhaps a dozen editorial workers at one of his sites–not the 20 or so that Hearst has working in editorial.

And bear in mind that Gawker’s titles have a national focus, not a regional one, which makes it much easier to sell than Seattlepi.com.  There may be a thriving business for regional/local online ads one day, and we’ve been hearing about the potential for many years. But it’s not there yet, and it’s not close.

Still, better to have Hearst says it’s encouraged than to have Hearst pull the plug after a few days.

Two months after becoming the nation’s largest newspaper to move to an all-digital news model, seattlepi.com’s year over year numbers show that it has more users this April than last April, when the Post Intelligencer was still publishing with an 80% larger staff, an amazing feat for an online venture with a newsroom of 20.

In April, its first full month of operation, seattlepi.com had 4.3 million unique visitors, up 1.6% from 4.2 million in April 2008 (source: Omniture). Total page views for the month were 37.3 million.

During the last week of April, the site broke its one-day unique user record since going online-only. There were 324,000 unique visitors on April 30—the 4th highest day in terms of unique visitors in 2009—breaking previous records set since going online only on April 29 (290,000) and April 27 (283,000). Total page views for those days were 1.5 million, 1.4 million and 1.5 million, respectively.

Two months into our online-only experiment, we are encouraged by this growth in visitors and expect our numbers to improve as we continue to establish new partnerships.

We get a lot of feedback from readers cheering us on and thanking us for continuing to bring them the local news and information they want and need. It’s great to see that not only have we not lost readers, we’ve actually gained new ones.

A new team of more than a dozen sales and marketing representatives and managers has been tasked with building advertising and marketing partnerships and creating a unique Seattle digital advertising agency.

Our sales and marketing team is highly energized to be working with such a vital and dynamic product. We will leverage existing partnerships with Yahoo!, Kaango, Metrix4Media, and others to create what is essentially a local digital advertising agency offering unique opportunities for business in the Seattle area and across the country. Advertisers and other partners understand that seattlepi.com is in an unrivaled, popular destination for news and information, offering tremendous value for exposing their products, services and brands to a large and very desirable audience.

Here’s the paper’s own report on its impending demise:

The Seattle P-I is being put up for sale, and if after 60 days it has not sold, it will either be turned into a Web-only publication with a greatly reduced staff or discontinued entirely.

‘One thing is clear: at the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print,’ said Steven Swartz, president of the Hearst Corp.’s newspaper division.

Swartz addressed the P-I’s newsroom at about noon Friday, flanked by P-I editor and publisher Roger Oglesby and Lincoln Millstein, Hearst’s senior vice president for digital media.

Swartz said the reason for offering the paper for sale is purely economic.

‘Since 2000, the P-I has lost money each year, and the losses have escalated and continue to escalate in 2009,’ he said. ‘We have had to make a very tough decision. This is a business decision and it is no reflection on your work. The decision reflects our inability to see the losses turning around soon.’

In a release circulated shortly after Swartz finished speaking, Hearst said the P-I lost about $14 million in 2008.”

And here’s a reaction from John Cook, a P-I veteran who left the paper last year to start up TechFlash, a tech/biz blog he runs with fellow refugee Todd Bishop:

Could this be its final dance? It’s too early to say. The bigger questions are whether Hearst is doing some behind-the-scenes dealing, and whether the P-I could sustain itself as an online-only operation.

Obviously, we’re big believers in the power of online media. We know it is still an experiment in many ways, but given the rocky state of the daily newspaper business, we’ve always asked ourselves: ‘What’s to lose?’

Anyway, we don’t think the last chapter has been written in this story. The timing is truly bizarre. What the P-I needs now is a white knight to emerge from the Seattle tech community. A savior. Someone with gobs of money who doesn’t mind losing some of it.

What’s Paul Allen doing these days?”

To answer John’s question about the paper’s ability to sustain itself as an online-only offering: It can’t.

Quantcast pegs the paper’s traffic at 2.6 million uniques. That would keep a blog with a handful of writers and editors afloat–if it had a specific niche, like, say technology news. And if it had a national audience to sell to advertisers. But a generalized news site for a local audience? No one’s figured out how to do it yet, and a recession probably isn’t the time to solve that riddle.

It’s hard to see how the paper stays afloat without a white knight. And it’s hard to see how this won’t play out in cities across the country over the next few years.

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