“Sequel” to the million dollar homepage using WebGL
milliondollarmetropolis.com
milliondollarmetropolis.com
The original Million Dollar Homepage from 2005 wasn’t just ambitious - it was absurd. One pixel for one dollar? A website with an oddly specific title and purpose? The goal of a million dollars? The novelty of it all quickly captured the attention of people, and soon, the press. In under a year, every single one of those outrageously expensive ad slots were sold, and Alex Tew - just a student at the time - walked away a millionaire.
Hundreds of spectators decided they weren’t going to miss out on an opportunity to make a bunch of money fast and easy. So-called “pixel ad” websites began popping up everywhere. They would change a few things up, in an attempt to recreate the novelty which drove the original to success. One such website called itself the ten-thousand dollar homepage. Another tried to sell a single pixel for a million dollars. None were successful.
The idea of permanently selling previously worthless ad-space at a high price for a high profit had already been done. Despite their efforts, these copy-cat websites were not original enough and did not capture people’s attention.
Is the idea of a bunch of 3D rendered rectangles enough to capture people’s attention? I don’t think so.
The “Million Dollar Metropolis” is not even close to a sequel. It’s the latest in a long series of failed get-rich-quick schemes.
And as long as I’ve captured your attention with this comment, consider leaving a donation with the link in my bio.
I suspect something fishy is going on (as in, paid for upvotes and comments).
That kind of sums up the whole dot-com boom and bust right there.
Who would want to buy a building out in the corner? Maybe the starting location should be randomized, at least.
Although for that to make sense, each building should be tokenized with an auction-backed tradable token so people could speculate on real estate how they see fit (should it still be called real estate?)
Bonus points if you geocode the entry location based on IP.
Or we could, you know, spend our efforts not building an asinine virtual advertising pissing field.
Fake estate.
Of course, you'd have to re-evaluate what the prime spot is as well based on views.
actually never mind, IIRC that's what the last instalment of Sim City did / wanted to do.
This way there's no "center" and no edges.
You looked, didn't you?
This thing just chugs my phone and feels awful to interact with.
From Wikipedia.
No. You miss the point of the original. That it was a cash grab by the person who made it. In that regard this works just fine.
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“You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.” -Mark Twain
Mark Twain: Corn-pone Opinions
http://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html
>[...] Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is conformity. Sometimes conformity has a sordid business interest -- the bread-and-butter interest -- but not in most cases, I think. I think that in the majority of cases it is unconscious and not calculated; that it is born of the human being's natural yearning to stand well with his fellows and have their inspiring approval and praise -- a yearning which is commonly so strong and so insistent that it cannot be effectually resisted, and must have its way. A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties -- the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety -- the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his life-long principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances. [...]
This "sequel" bears no similarities to the original in intent.
Godspeed, Mr. Metropolis Builder.
As a marketer, I can't imagine that there is a ton of long term value here. But it seems like that's baked in because it's a one time payment, and the prices are very reasonable.
There's also just enough customization options that I am already thinking of clever ways I could try to stand out.
This is like marketing catnip.
As others have mentioned, though, the big benefit of the first million-dollar homepage was the SEO value - along with the fact that for a few hundred bucks, you could have a bold ad that caught someone's eye amidst the chaos (FREE HOSTING comes to mind). The novelty of the project sold it to mass-market PR, which then sold it to the public, who then shared it with their friends.
As pretty as this project is, I think there's a lot less novelty here.
The novelty here is more WebGL, as well as the "Hey, someone's doing this again." WebGL implementation will attract the attention of a select few people; the "here we go again" will likely also capture a few clicks, but none like the first time around. The story just isn't as good for mass-media to run with.
So while my right brain starts to go through 'how can I work with this?', my left brain chimes in with 'I can get a whole lot more ROI from $2k worth of Facebook ads this time around.'
Still a cool idea and very pretty to look at, though. If you get in early (so you can stand out), it might be a good buy.
The original million dollar webpage had the entire block of 1million pixels fit within a standard resolution browser window. Users could mouse over every pixel on it to see what each was without scrolling around on the page.
That site inspired someone to create the Million Dollar Wall, which scrolled sideways for like a mile, and was trying to sell ads on it. But it didn't work b/c scrolling is not fun or interesting.
You might have a similar challenge with this site.
"That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives."
This happens in real life.
AT&T, Verizon, Nokia, Garmin, and other brands put up flashy "flagship" stores on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago knowing there's no way they can ever sell enough gadgets to pay the rent. Those are nothing more than three dimensional billboards for the brand in a district where billboards are prohibited. It's not even a secret.
This product doesn't make any sense to me, but major kudos on this guy delivering success after success.
The ability to "walk down the street" and use keyboard controls would make this far more interesting as well.
As it stands, it's a cool implementation, but I wouldn't expect it to catch on the same way as milliondollarhomepage did.
It was a advertising gimic page. You buy pixels (1$ per) and make anything you want, they put your link to those pixels.
Don't click. (I clicked "guitars" and got a wrong OS notice, my adobe was out of date.. ).
Also wonder if there's any study on ongoing advertising impact on these links. For example, a number of links on their don't resolve anymore - are those domains worth anything more than a usual registar price?
It sounds like you'd prefer these people don't make their views known in your presence.
Your comment indicated that you wanted to punish them by making the mistake of doing so.
Much of the most effective advertising is honest and factual. For a discussion of this by one of the advertising greats, see the book "Ogilvy on Advertising." [0]
"If I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."
In the real world, you definitely 100% need to get in front of people to convince them that your solution solves their problems. Or make them realize they have a problem in the first place.
LOL.
[0]: https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...
On the other hand, if you create a great product but don't advertise at all, it can take a very long time to grow organically, since you don't have any initial users to share your product. Instead you can advertise to get that initial user base, and then your happy customers will help you to continue to grow. You could stop advertising at that point, but as long as your product is good you can probably grow even faster by continuing to market it to people.
Now sure, a lot of marketing is zero-sum. IE, Coke vs Pepsi and similar: ads whose purpose is to sway you between well-known competitors. But a lot of it does provide discovery for unknown products too.
And finally, most people expect it. I'm not exaggerating when I say at autotempest we get an order of magnitude more people complaining that we don't advertise enough than that we advertise too much. Often this will be new users who say something like, "This is great—wish I'd known about it years ago! You guys should do better marketing." Of course nothing would have stopped them from searching for a service like ours. We rank very highly on Google and such; but most people don't work that way.
(The answer is "probably not". But I'm mostly playing off the "if tree falls in a forest…" snowclone.)
Some advertising is... effective (in that it effectively beats the existence of your product into the unwilling consumer's brain meat). But a lot of money still gets sunk into popup ads and print media, most people don't even see either of those anymore. You're better off buying google ad-words targeted at furry communities.
Nowadays, it takes a lot more to get that kind of attention. I don't think it'd be possible without some kind of groundbreaking new technology -- well beyond anything that's on display here.
Uh... funny you should mention that, actually. I'm a member of that community, and I've seen certain mainstream advertisers target that audience in some rather specific and intelligent ways. :)
If nothing else, this could add some easy exposure for my personal side project.
I think enough time has passed since "million dollar homepage" that this could get some modest attention.
It'd be neat if open source projects used a similar monetization scheme.
- the creator benefits from more people buying adds by getting money
- the advertisers benefit by the site's notoriety getting bigger and getting more visits as a result.
so i would think the rate of ad sales would look like some kind of exponential curve, so long as the price remains constant and the thing doesn't die off. does anyone know of any data on the original and how the sales worked? then again, it could just fill up all at once more or less, if it got everyone's attention. its kind of like a pyramid scheme that turns in to regular advertising if it succeeds.
It's cool to see a modern take on the original idea. Makes me wonder what other future ideas could be.
So I'll never see this. And indeed, nobody who cares about privacy should ever risk it. But so it goes.
Edit: I'm not making this up. I actually tested. Multiple Debian family VMs on a given host have the same WebGL fingerprint. As do multiple Windows 7 VMs, multiple CentOS VMs, multiple MacOS VMs, etc.
But each group has a different WebGL fingerprint. And the same Debian VM has different WebGL fingerprints on different hosts. So I'm guessing that reflects the combination of physical graphics hardware and virtual graphics system.
That's a huge gotcha for people who compartmentalize in multiple VMs.
If someone cares to explain why that's not an issue, I'd love to see it.
And it uses blockchain. And it actually comes with instructions and customer support that you can email.
It is a great first crypto asset, since we walk you through it. And it is just the same gimmickyness as the original.