A PIONEERING website designed to promote Darlington to the wider public has been worth £400,000 of coverage, according to council leaders.

The Darlington Experiment cost only £22,000 to set up, but coverage in the regional and national media has been worth 20 times as much in free publicity.

Among the success stories linked to the website have been the appointment of the town's twitterer-in-residence, Mike McTimoney, and the documentary film Beauty and the Bike.

Council leader John Williams has tabled a report to be made to Darlington Borough Council's full meeting next Thursday.

The project, known as the Darlington Experiment 2.0, was launched in September. The idea came from Darlington Partnership and other groups in the town.

A website features a Tube Train in honour of Darlington's forefront at the birth of the railways.

People were asked to submit content for the website via other internet sites such as Facebook, You Tube, Flickr and Twitter.

Coun Williams' report said more than 6,000 people had accessed the project via Facebook, there had been more than quarter of a million views of videos on YouTube, 127 photographs submitted to Flickr with a specific dx2 tag and 365 followers on Twitter.

Coun Williams' report added: "In addition to marketing the town, the videos uploaded portray Darlington and its residents in a positive way, as being creative, vibrant, fun-loving and energetic."

Although the creation of the project received lots of national coverage, Coun Williams said the "most prominent" positive reporting came after the appointment of Mr McTimoney as the first town twitterer in the country.

It was reported in international media, overseas print titles as well as those in the UK, on television, national radio and on 77 websites.

Coun Williams' report concluded that the future of the project would be considered by the partner bodies.

Not all the coverage has been positive. Satirical magazine Private Eye reported a mix-up that the original marketing term chooching has to be changed at the last minute after it was discovered to have an embarrassing double meaning.

Councillor Heather Scott, leader of the Conservative group, said her main concerns about how many people used the site.

She added: "The thing is that in these difficult times, we must do everything to draw people in to Darlington."

John Orchard, Marchday Group Plc, said: "The Darlington Experiment has been an inspirational project for us all. We started with a simple but quite abstract goal; to recapture the creative spirit of Darlington which once gave birth to the railways.

"We ended up with a project which has genuinely developed a life of its own - real people's project - and showcased modern Darlington's spirit of creativity. The Experiment has caught the imagination of the National media with one Experiment 'The Darlo Bard' bringing attention from around the world. "Now that the profile has been raised around the town I can't wait to see what happens next."