I’m really curious what the original owner of the domain thought the value of spending $200 on that little ad was. Like nobody is going to see it in the sea of other ads, and backlinks weren’t a thing then. Why else would you buy it?
Being permanently online, I saw MDH quite early on and when it began to get some initial press mentions, I figured it might go big. I hit up a friend/client of mine - Ben Neumann (RIP) - who was CEO of Globat, a hosting company. He was hugely into guerilla marketing techniques (like paying a guy to have their logo as a tattoo or sneaking a Saddam Hussein themed ad into a popular computer magazine - a story in itself) so this was totally up his street and he immediately bought the large space now marked "FREE HOSTING" in the top middle.
At the time, Globat used to pay quite juicy commissions to folks for hosting referrals (equivalent to about the whole first year of hosting fees) so even if he ended up with 50 signups from it, it would have broken even.
I placed a very small ad featuring my blog's URL in the back pages of The New Yorker: it cost $500 or so.
I figured you never know who might see it and visit.
For perspective: at peak popularity back then I got about 10,000 visitors/15,000 page views DAILY.
Nowadays I get an average of 500 page views daily.
I checked to see how much such an ad would cost:
>A simple 1-inch black-and-white classified style ad costs $6,066.
Pass.