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milliondollarhomepage.com

71 pointsjlangenauer46 comments

Yeah I sure do. I bought the square with the "R" for reserved just beneath the grey "Download Movies" button near the middle top.

The guy rejected my icon the first time around, I think I accidentally made it 11x10 or something instead of 10x10. So I resent it within 24 hours but he didn't get or ignored that email and the few subsequent ones after that. :(

I loved the idea and the guy running it seemed like a great guy, but it left a sour taste in my mouth when I didn't even get the graphic I wanted.

Luckily I was really just seeing what would happen and hoping in vain I would magically profit from the trickle of click-throughs one day.

He was sonewhat notorious on the London geek social scene for being an arogant jerk.

I met him a few times. It seemed like he "suceeded" too early with no real idea of how to do business.

He seemed like an ok kid that found himself with a lot of money overnight. We've all seen the "what now" threads on HN imagine how that could affect a teenager without the right people to help guide them.

The original idea was very good and inspired many clones idea. Then the creator got lots of praise and hype. I remember reading articles about investors offering him lots of money. Not to punish his original creative spark, but the story of milliondollarhomepage always reminds me of this english phrase: once you are lucky, twice you are good.

> The original idea was very good and inspired many clones idea.

Reminds me of Groupon.

That's why that if you receive all that news hype and publicity one day, you have to remember that your own bed will always be the best place to sleep at night. Gotta keep grounded.

One attempted copy: http://rhizome.org/50k/. Sadly doesn't look like they met their goal.

It'd be interesting to see where the advertisers ended up in all of this. I'd imagine they got some SEO out of it but it doesn't strike me that "tabmarks" has gone very far since the million dollar homepage launched. I wonder what the average ROI was, and if the million dollar homepage served as an effective launchpad for anyone or anything.

I used to work for one of the companies who bought in early (they're top left somewhere :). Not sure it brought us much, if anything, though it did get the company logo on TV a few times when it was picked up by the news.

We bought a 20x20 spot (JobDig, if you can find it on the page you have too much free time). All we got out of it was a bunch of spam from all the 50k homepages and things like that...

The reward from it was we bought the person who made the $400 purchase a t-shirt with the page printed on it, in honor of the "great" idea:)

Well, if the testimonials are to be believed, some people did appear to make some conversions:

http://milliondollarhomepage.com/testimonials.php

For fun: go to http://milliondollarhomepage.com/pixellist.php and check out how many of these sites no longer exist.

The top site, http://www.rentpixelads.com/en/ , is a placeholder. As are quite a few.

Is it just me, or does the list of sites look like the average spam folder?

The same guy had a startup fail spectacularly afterwards, with investor money ('low six figures') down the drain. It was a cheezeburger-style funny video/picture aggregator called PopJam.

"It's LOL over folks:"

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/01/07/its-lol-over-folks-popja...

Well timed. The guy behind Million Dollar Homepage just tweeted asking for testers for his latest idea: http://www.webcamconga.com/

The tweet: http://twitter.com/tewy/status/16227749407

facepalm

It's kind of galling how such moronic things can make large amounts of money for one individual, whereas other folks (scientists, mathematicians, engineers) who are really striving to make a fundamental contribution to society barely make ends meet.

Perhaps a lobotomy is the way forward.

The million dollars were revenue; not sure about the guy's net profits when everything was said and done. If I understand correctly, there was some kind of SLA in place -- the people who bought all those pixels expected them to be on line for a certain period of time, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage#DDo...

Ah.. one of the lightning never strikes twice type of ideas that worked well for one guy but all the followers and imitators were left in the frigid cold wasteland.

I knew a lot of people that would just sit there and dartboard the site for a half hour each day. I just went a few times and looked at how it was filling up and trying to figure out if there was anything else to do like that myself.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=milliondollarhomepage.com

........Blip!.......... oh wait what was that?

Remember THIS? http://www.pixelotto.com/

I didn't think so.

Yep, but the interesting thing is the banner on top... "Discover how to make $10k per day!". I'm subscribing now.

Seriously, he "earned" 1 million with this "innovative" method and now he is publishing a scam site (or at least this is what it appear to be)?

Yep - I've got a 10x10 pixel slice of history on there. The link it points to is down now - my first attempt at earning money via the internet. First 3 or 4 months it generated a 800 - 1000 CTR. After that, headed south quite quickly.. No reason to visit after the news/PR died-down.

Yeah, so what's the point?

It must be a reductionist comment on the transcient nature of the internet.

Yeah, what is so noteworthy about making a million dollars with a 1000x1000 pixel image?

(this is sarcasm)

well, it generated him million dollars overnight.

Wasn't exactly overnight (5 months)... And it ended up being more than a million because he reserved some pixels and then auctioned them off on ebay. $1,037,100, according to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Dollar_Homepage).

The guy made a million dollars. You know, I had an idea like that once. A long time ago...

At least Tom made a prototype of his idea, rather than letting the "Jump to Conclusions" map fester in his mind forever.

I can't believe you're not getting more upvotes for this, it had me laughing pretty hard.

Could you elaborate?? I can barely conclude anything from your comment.

I remember hearing about this a long time ago. Even then I thought it was a dumb idea. How many people would repeatedly visit this site to see the adverts, other than the advertisers themselves?

Did the fellow ever end up making a million dollars?

He ended up selling them all yeah. Minus tax and whatnot, he still pocketed a tidy sum and decided to forego university (which it was originally to pay for) and become a business god.

I suppose this is evidence that hype works, at least over short time scales, although in this case I guess that his reputation must have subsequently suffered.

So what is this gentleman doing these days, I'm genuinely interested to see how he's fared.

buy a book from Paul Carr - Confessions of the media whore - there is quite a bit written on Alex Tew there - quite an entertaining book I would say :)

Yes. I remember. I have created a first clone of this in my country (Czech republic) and raised few grand for charity. It was my first business (if you can call this business) and a great learning experience. Unfortunately I let the domain expire by mistake - it would be great to have it still running just for a piece of internet history :)

check archive.org

It's funny the page has a banner at the top that is bigger than any purchased section...

Because the hosting was illimited, it's good to have some revenues to finance it...

how did they process single $1 purchases back then? how would you do that now?

I think the minimum was like 10x10, so $100

That explains how he was able to label some squares as "R"eserved - I was wondering how he'd label areas smaller than his R.

I'm sure nobody bought individual pixels - most of the images on there look like they're 10x10 ($100) or bigger.

Crazy! I was thinking about this site in the shower today.

Nope

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