The Million Dollar Homepage
The Million Dollar Homepage (As of 8 February 2009) |
| URL | MillionDollarHomepage.com |
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| Commercial? | Yes |
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| Type of site | Pixel advertising |
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| Registration | none |
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| Owner | Alex Tew |
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| Created by | Alex Tew |
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| Launched | 26 August 2005 |
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| Alexa rank | 33,561 (As of 25 November 2010) |
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| Revenue | $1,037,100 |
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| Current status | Active |
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The Million Dollar Homepage is a
website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from
Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his
university education. The
home page consists of a million
pixels arranged in a
1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for
$1 per pixel in
10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a
URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a
cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator.
The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels.
Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an
Internet phenomenon. The
Alexa ranking of
web traffic peaked at around 127; as of 18 December 2009, it is 35,983.
[3] On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on
eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross income.
Development
From the outset I knew the idea had potential, but it was one of those things that could have gone either way. My thinking was I had nothing to lose (apart from the 50 Euros or so it cost to register the domain and setup the hosting). I knew that the idea was quirky enough to create interest ... The Internet is a very powerful medium.
Alex Tew, 22 February 2006.
Alex Tew, a student from
Cricklade in Wiltshire, England, conceived The Million Dollar Homepage in August 2005 when he was 21 years old. He was about to begin a three-year Business Management course at the
University of Nottingham, and was concerned that he would be left with a
student loan that could take years to repay.As a money-raising idea, Tew decided to sell a million pixels on a website for
$1 each; purchasers would add their own image,
logo or advertisement, and have the option of including a
hyperlink to their website. Pixels were sold for US dollars rather than
UK pounds; the US has a larger online population than the UK, and Tew believed more people would relate to the concept if the pixels were sold in US currency.In 2005, the pound was
strong against the dollar: £1 was worth approximately $1.80, and that cost per pixel may have been too expensive for many potential buyers.Tew's setup costs were
€50, which paid for the registration of the domain name and a basic web-hosting package. The website went live on 26 August 2005.
The
homepage featured a
Web banner with the site's name and a pixel counter displaying the number of pixels sold, a
navigation bar containing nine small links to the site's internal
web pages, and an empty square grid of 1,000,000 pixels divided into 10,000 100-pixel blocks. Tew promised customers that the site would remain online for at least five years – that is, until at least 26 August 2010.
Pixel sales
Because individual pixels are too small to be seen easily, Pixels were sold in 100-pixel "blocks" measuring
10 × 10 pixels; the minimum price was thus $100.The first sale, three days after the site began operating, was to an online music website operated by a friend of Tew's. He bought 400 pixels in a
20 × 20 block. After two weeks, Tew's friends and family members had purchased a total of 4,700 pixels. The site was initially marketed only through
word of mouth; however, after the site had made $1,000, a
press release was sent out that was picked up by the
BBC. The technology news website
The Register featured two articles on The Million Dollar Homepage in September. By the end of the month, The Million Dollar Homepage had received $250,000 and was ranked Number 3 on
Alexa Internet's list of "Movers and Shakers" behind the websites for
Britney Spears and
Photo District News. On 6 October, Tew reported the site received 65,000 unique visitors; it received 1465
Diggs, becoming one of the most Dugg links that week.Eleven days later, the number had increased to 100,000 unique visitors. On 26 October, two months after the Million Dollar Homepage was launched, more than 500,900 pixels had been sold to 1,400 customers.By New Year's Eve, Tew reported that the site was receiving hits from 25,000 unique visitors every hour and had an
Alexa Rank of 127, and that 999,000 of the 1,000,000 pixels had been sold.
On 1 January 2006, Tew announced that because the demand was so great for the last 1,000 pixels, "the most fair and logical thing" to do was auction them on
eBay rather than lose "the integrity and degree of exclusivity intrinsic to the million-pixel concept" by launching a second Million Dollar Homepage.The auction lasted ten days and received 99 legitimate bids. Although bids were received for amounts as high as $160,109.99, many were either retracted by the bidders or cancelled as hoaxes."I actually contacted the people by phone and turns out they weren't serious, which is fairly frustrating, so I removed those bidders at the last minute", said Tew.The winning bid was $38,100,placed by MillionDollarWeightLoss.com, an online store selling diet-related products.Tew remarked that he had expected the final bid amount to be higher due to the media attention.The Million Dollar Homepage made a
gross total of $1,037,100 in five months.After costs, taxes and a donation to
The Prince's Trust, a charity for young people, Tew expected his
net income to be $650,000–$700,000.
Pixel purchasers included
Bonanza Gift Shop,
Panda Software, the producers of
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price,
British Schools Karting Championship,
Book of Cool,
Orange,
The Times,
Cheapflights.com,
Schiffer Publishing,
Rhapsody,
Tenacious D,
GoldenPalace.com,
888.com and other
online casinos,
Independiente Records,
Yahoo!, small privately owned businesses, and companies offering
get-rich-quick schemes,
online dating services,
personal loans,
free samples,
website designs and holidays.
Media attention
The crucial thing in creating the media interest was the idea itself: it was unique and quirky enough to stand out. I only had to push the idea a bit in the first few days by sending out a press release which essentially acted as a catalyst. This interest coupled with traditional word-of-mouth created a real buzz about the homepage, which in turn created more interest.
Alex Tew, 22 February 2006.
[4]By November the website was becoming popular around the world, receiving attention from
Financial Times Deutschland in Germany,
TVNZ in New Zealand,
Terra Networks in Latin America,the
China Daily, and especially in the United States where it was covered in
Adweek,
Florida Today, and
Wall Street Journal. Tew hired a US-based publicist to help with the attention from the American media and made a week-long trip to the US, where he was interviewed on
ABC News Radio,the
Fox News Channel,
Attack of the Show!,and local news programmes.
The concept was described as "simple and brilliant","clever", "ingenious",and "a unique platform [for advertising] which is also a bit of fun".Professor Martin Binks, director of the Nottingham University Institute for Entrepreneurial Innovation, said, "It is brilliant in its simplicity ... advertisers have been attracted to it by its novelty ... the site has become a phenomenon."
Popular Mechanics said, "There's no content. No cool graphics, giveaways or steamy Paris Hilton videos for viewers to salivate over. Imagine a TV channel that shows nothing but commercials, a magazine with nothing but ads. That's The Million Dollar Homepage. An astonishing example of the power of
viral marketing".Don Oldenburg of the
Washington Post was one of the few without praise for the site, calling it a "cheap, mind-bogglingly lucrative marketing monstrosity, an advertising badlands of spam, banner ads and pop-ups." Oldenburg continues, "it looks like a bulletin board on designer steroids, an advertising train wreck you can't
not look at. It's like getting every pop-up ad you ever got in your life, at once. It's the Internet equivalent of suddenly feeling like you want to take a shower."
As the final pixels were being auctioned, Tew was interviewed on
Richard & Judy,and profiled in the online
BBC News Magazine.
The Wall Street Journal wrote about The Million Dollar Homepage and its impact on the Internet community. "Mr. Tew himself has taken on celebrity status in the Internet community ... the creative juice ... paints an interesting picture of online entrepreneurship".
Tew dropped out of the business degree the site was set-up to fund after one term.In 2008, Tew founded Popjam, an Internet aggregation and
social networking business.
DDoS attack
On 7 January 2006, three days before the auction of the final 1,000 pixels was due to end, Tew received an e-mail from an organization called "The Dark Group", and was told The Million Dollar Homepage would become the victim of a
distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) if a ransom of $5,000 was not paid by 10 January.Believing the threat to be a hoax, he ignored it, but a week later received a second e-mail threat: "Hello u website is under us atack to stop the DDoS send us 50000$." Again, he ignored the threat, and the website was flooded with extra traffic and e-mails, causing it to
crash. "I haven't replied to any of them as I don't want to give them the satisfaction and I certainly don't intend to pay them any money. What is happening to my website is like terrorism. If you pay them, new attacks will start," Tew said.
The website was inaccessible to visitors for a week until the host server upgraded the security system, and filtered traffic through anti-DDoS software.
[49][50] Wiltshire Constabulary's Hi-Tech Crime Unit and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation were called to investigate the extortion and attack; they believed it originated in Russia.
Similar websites
Many other sites sell advertising by pixels.Tew said of the sites, "[they] popped up almost immediately; now there are hundreds of Web sites selling pixels. The copycats are all competing with each other.They have very little ads, therefore I guess it’s not going too well for them. The idea only works once and relies on novelty. Any copy-cat sites will only have pure comedy value, whereas mine possibly has a bit of comedy plus. So I say good luck to the imitators."
