Other than the Wikipedia page linked above, here's just my two cents:
A guy back in 2005 came up with a get rich quick scheme where he sold 1 million pixels of ad space on his domain to pay for his college education. You'd pay $1 per pixel of ad space until they were all gone. It got a ton of hype and was pretty internet-famous for awhile, so the guy did indeed sell all of the space.
Oh, yeah... good old days. Then the guy also launched a pixel lotto something and made another 250K, by the way. Now he's working here http://www.calm.com/
That was my first "business idea". After seeing it take off so rapidly. I setup first clone in my country and donated all profits to charity. It was not much, about $2000 in total but I learned a ton of useful stuff which helped me later to progress to bigger and more profitable things. What I learned back then is that if something works in one country, you can usually replicate it with some success elsewhere. I have taken that lesson and most of my successes in recent years been due to this "copy" strategy.
Forgot all about this. I toyed with the idea of buying some ad space when there was still some space available. In fact I remember when it was 80% free still.
I think I'm right in saying he went on to try another iteration of the pixel idea; http://www.pixelotto.com
By his twitter, it seems he's now running an iPhone meditation app at http://calm.com
Apart from pixelotto he also started onemillionpeople.com which basically was a photobook where you could buy a place for your own picture.
I think pixelotto had some small success but overall his later "riding the wave" ideas didnt do to well.
An explanation for those who've never seen this before:
A long long time ago on an Internet far from here a young man had an idea. His idea was simple but genius. He would make a homepage (as they were called back then) with a grid of 100 by 100 squares each ten pixels across. Each square could hold an image 10x10 pixels. One million pixels.
Back when we didn't have retina displays and Stallmann was still young designers thought 10x10 pixels was plenty to make a pretty picture. You could then buy a square for one hundred dollars; a dollar a pixel. And if people clicked on the pretty picture you had made in your square they would be taken to your homepage. If you had lots of money or worked for one of those new dot-com's you could buy more than one square so your designer could make a bigger picture.
Now, you can probably guess why it was called the million Dollar Homepage (Hint 1000 x 1000 = 1 million), and as you can see all the squares were sold so the architect reached his goal, won his bet and retreated back to the matrix to devise new ingenious devious ideas.
Edit: changed ten dollars to one hundred dollars - thanks for pointing it out jgrubb.
Remember this is Internet time (not to be confused with Swatch Internet time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)) which is a whole different beast to normal time. I clearly remember both my dot-com coach and my advisory board telling me over champagne brunch that Internet time was at least 5 times normal time. This would make it 40 years ago, and not 8.
This was 2005, so its not that long ago, we already had facebook for example ;) Still the idea was pretty novel and worked, many tried to copy the approach and failed. Even Alex Tew, the guy behind the site, came back later with a Photobook and some other pixel based business idea (pixelotto) but couldnt replicate the success.
Facebook was a very different site back then. People still used MySpace. iPhone was still not introduced for 2 years. Apples computers were named iBook and PowerBook and run on PPC for one more year.
Sure, 8 years is a long time in IT but still. The same year we got the Xbox360 (which is still around) and buzzwords like Web 2.0 and Ajax were all over the place. Doesnt seem too distant in my memory atleast.
If you look at it, you can see how many of the pixel buys were made by people themselves trying to copy the idea for "pixel ads". Even the day it came out I thought it was funny that people could think that would actually become a "thing". Ad space was too cheap to sell for that to be anything but a one-off gimmick. A cute gimmick, but obviously a gimmick from the moment it happened.
The mainstream media, particularly in the UK really picked up on this story at the time and I would say the 'pay for tuition' component played a big part in that.
There's an incomplete list of coverage he received on the site [1] but it doesn't include TV or radio, which was a fair amount too from memory.
I actually advertised on this when it came out. $100 for the little zebra print square, top left corner, 2nd row down, "YOUR OWN PHOTO WEBSITE" (just to the right of 'Bingo').
Was fun to be a part of it going viral at the time.
EDIT: Incidentally, the amount of spam I've received since for clone sites has been staggering.
I was the developer who wrote the PHP that this site ran on. I knew Alex from Humanbeatbox.com - we were both beatboxers (known as A-Plus and BeatMuppet) who met at some jams. One night he rang me up saying that he had this site and it was getting a bit out of hand!
Initially he was managing the orders himself and manually updating the site, but as the media coverage grew and the traffic picked up, it was no longer manageable. I wrote a simple system to add, remove and move the pixels and helped with the orders.
Eventually, he had to take a couple of other people on to help with the orders - it really was a media storm as Alex was on TV and stuff!
It was a crazy few weeks but I'm very glad to have been a part of this!
Well, once the site had filled up, there was not really any more demand. Ean and myself, who were doing the orders, went off to do other things. I was working a full time job at the time as well, so that was kind of a relief, because even at 25 years old, 16 hour days take their toll!
I'm English and typically squeamish about money but suffice to say, the site really did make a million dollars (before tax). Alex paid me generously for my services and it paid for a good chunk of the deposit on my house!
Alex has gone on to do a lot of cool stuff. I'm currently principal software developer at Box UK and involved with tech meetups and open source. Oh, I do still rock the human beatbox!
On a half-serious note, what longevity did you expect from companies spending their marketing bucks on stuff like this?
But yeah, links on the internet survive much longer than the sites they point to; when I am hunting for information on something, I encounter at least one dead link per hour.
If you were an agency touting expertise in internet memes, a $1600 investment in 2005 could still be paying a handsome dividend in internet street cred today.
The idea of it was a smart idea, but the real reason for the success was the marketability of the story behind it.
In a world of internet before everything went viral, this story was just 'crazy enough' to essentially go viral. The concept of a page being worth a million dollars both in a literal and theoretical sense made this quite a popular link to share in the initial phase (when the site was empty apart from a couple of adverts).
This then drove a viral / media engine (including television / radio and word of mouth) which suddenly actually made the pixels on the page worth something!
Companies now flocked to get adverts on the site which was getting a large number of genuine traffic / media attention and thus the media cycle continued (as it was now a profitable, extremely successful site) - this in turn finished when the page was full and months later everyone lost interest.
Unfortunately, I think many of the copy cat sites didn't understand why this was successful in the first place. It was a clever new idea, which was likely to get press attention for being so 'unique' / 'clever' - the copy cats were unlikely to ever get the same 'viral' effect, so were never going to become successful like the original site.
If I remember correctly, even the founder himself tried to spin off a second site based on the same concept with limited success - mainly because people had seen it before.
At least one of the ads still works. The place I worked at back then jumped on it early (maybe only 9 or 10 other ads at that point). They paid more for a few pixels than I earned that month!
86 comments
[ 55.8 ms ] story [ 1996 ms ] threadA guy back in 2005 came up with a get rich quick scheme where he sold 1 million pixels of ad space on his domain to pay for his college education. You'd pay $1 per pixel of ad space until they were all gone. It got a ton of hype and was pretty internet-famous for awhile, so the guy did indeed sell all of the space.
The lines between crowdfunding, accepting preorders, and just running a business are fairly blurry.
2/10 will not click again
Who was the first human in space? Who was the second?
Who was the first human to orbit the Earth? Who was the second?
Who was the first human to set foot on the moon? The second? The third?
I think I'm right in saying he went on to try another iteration of the pixel idea; http://www.pixelotto.com
By his twitter, it seems he's now running an iPhone meditation app at http://calm.com
A long long time ago on an Internet far from here a young man had an idea. His idea was simple but genius. He would make a homepage (as they were called back then) with a grid of 100 by 100 squares each ten pixels across. Each square could hold an image 10x10 pixels. One million pixels.
Back when we didn't have retina displays and Stallmann was still young designers thought 10x10 pixels was plenty to make a pretty picture. You could then buy a square for one hundred dollars; a dollar a pixel. And if people clicked on the pretty picture you had made in your square they would be taken to your homepage. If you had lots of money or worked for one of those new dot-com's you could buy more than one square so your designer could make a bigger picture.
Now, you can probably guess why it was called the million Dollar Homepage (Hint 1000 x 1000 = 1 million), and as you can see all the squares were sold so the architect reached his goal, won his bet and retreated back to the matrix to devise new ingenious devious ideas.
Edit: changed ten dollars to one hundred dollars - thanks for pointing it out jgrubb.
source: GT freshman in 2005 :)
Btw how did it go viral back then? Curious. Was it cause of his story? Pay for tuition.
There's an incomplete list of coverage he received on the site [1] but it doesn't include TV or radio, which was a fair amount too from memory.
[1] http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/press.php
After a few minutes searching I was only able to find one site that still worked.
http://www.sexeys.somerset.sch.uk/alumni/alex-tew
…and our old school is really called Sexey's.
Was fun to be a part of it going viral at the time.
EDIT: Incidentally, the amount of spam I've received since for clone sites has been staggering.
Initially he was managing the orders himself and manually updating the site, but as the media coverage grew and the traffic picked up, it was no longer manageable. I wrote a simple system to add, remove and move the pixels and helped with the orders.
Eventually, he had to take a couple of other people on to help with the orders - it really was a media storm as Alex was on TV and stuff!
It was a crazy few weeks but I'm very glad to have been a part of this!
I'm English and typically squeamish about money but suffice to say, the site really did make a million dollars (before tax). Alex paid me generously for my services and it paid for a good chunk of the deposit on my house!
Alex has gone on to do a lot of cool stuff. I'm currently principal software developer at Box UK and involved with tech meetups and open source. Oh, I do still rock the human beatbox!
Thanks for sharing!
Perhaps because of the manual typography involved and the general silliness.
But yeah, links on the internet survive much longer than the sites they point to; when I am hunting for information on something, I encounter at least one dead link per hour.
Hurry up, there's only 999996 pins left ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In a world of internet before everything went viral, this story was just 'crazy enough' to essentially go viral. The concept of a page being worth a million dollars both in a literal and theoretical sense made this quite a popular link to share in the initial phase (when the site was empty apart from a couple of adverts).
This then drove a viral / media engine (including television / radio and word of mouth) which suddenly actually made the pixels on the page worth something!
Companies now flocked to get adverts on the site which was getting a large number of genuine traffic / media attention and thus the media cycle continued (as it was now a profitable, extremely successful site) - this in turn finished when the page was full and months later everyone lost interest.
Unfortunately, I think many of the copy cat sites didn't understand why this was successful in the first place. It was a clever new idea, which was likely to get press attention for being so 'unique' / 'clever' - the copy cats were unlikely to ever get the same 'viral' effect, so were never going to become successful like the original site.
If I remember correctly, even the founder himself tried to spin off a second site based on the same concept with limited success - mainly because people had seen it before.