The Million Dollar Homepage (2005) | Hacker News Reader

The Million Dollar Homepage (2005)

milliondollarhomepage.com

78 pointstomthorns82 comments

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!

do you know what happened after that? did it hold for long, or was it like a couple of months adventure? but mostly.... what about the money?

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!

Awesome. I remember when this came out and it was cool.

Thanks for sharing!

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.

I remember he did this to pay off his tuition fees.

Seeing as we're talking of just 8 years ago, I don't think Stallmann was still young.

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.

Stallman isn't a dog, or a computer, or a protocol, he's a human being, and 52 years of age does not equate to being "still a young man."

(slow clap)

What's a dot-com coach?

Probabaly some snake oil guy who tells how where to put your money wisely after the dot-com crash.

what are you talking about. Since when time goes at a different speed on the internet? Your champagne brunch was BS.

This has been here for 9 minutes and nobody has pointed out that a 10x10 square for $10 is not a dollar a pixel?!?

It was $100 for a 10x10 square; http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/buy.php

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.

When you put it like that, things really have changed!

Facebook was still an Ivy-league only site, right?

No, it was .edu email address only, though.

source: GT freshman in 2005 :)

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.

In 2005, mobile web meant WAP.

In 2005, you could already built sites with Rails and Textmate.

There was no TextMate 2 though!

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.

Notably, it was the media attention that made the idea work.

Attribution and everything. Who says HN etiquette is going down the tubes? Cheers mixmax.

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.

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.

People remember who did something first, and who did something best. If you're neither of those people, then try making your ideas faster or better

Alternatively, if you can't be first in a category then invent a new category in which you are first.

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 remember this from a book. Was it 22 immutable laws of marketing?

Yeah, it's the second law. One of the first marketing books I read that convinced me marketing wasn't all puffery.

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

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.

Remember One Red Paperclip? That was a good one too (2006) http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com

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.

http://validator.w3.org/checklink?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.milli...

W3 Link Validator.

List of broken links and other issues

There are issues with the URLs listed below. The table summarizes the issues and suggested actions by HTTP response status code.

Code Occurrences What to do

(N/A) 24 The link was not checked due to robots exclusion rules. Check the link manually, and see also the link checker documentation on robots exclusion.

(N/A) 110 The hostname could not be resolved. Check the link for typos.

400 4 This is usually the sign of a malformed URL that cannot be parsed by the server. Check the syntax of the link.

403 12 The link is forbidden! This needs fixing. Usual suspects: a missing index.html or Overview.html, or a missing ACL.

404 20 The link is broken. Double-check that you have not made any typo, or mistake in copy-pasting. If the link points to a resource that no longer exists, you may want to remove or fix the link.

405 2 The server does not allow HTTP HEAD requests, which prevents the Link Checker to check the link automatically. Check the link manually.

406 9 The server isn't capable of responding according to the Accept* headers sent. This is likely to be a server-side issue with negotiation.

500 14 This is a server side problem. Check the URI.

503 1 The server cannot service the request, for some unknown reason.

The most interesting thing about this is how many of the links don't go anywhere anymore.

After a few minutes searching I was only able to find one site that still worked.

Also interesting is how many links I am afraid to click while at work.

I purchased one of the first blocks, the Irish flag in the top left. It brought a steady stream of useless traffic, unsurprisingly.

We are actually creating a page similar to this for our clients. It will be live in a few days. We had a client directory but couldn't fit everyone on one page. So we decided to create smaller boxes for each clients. All of our clients will be on the same page and are encouraged to do business with each other and promote the page. Remember, hundreds of millions of people have come online in the past 5-10 years. And the key is not "copying" the exact idea but learning from and adapting all the models in the marketplace to create new projects. Ours is already selling but (BUT!)it is because we are already connected to these people (creatives, business owners, etc.) and we're not out to create a gimmick but simply to connect clients and friends of clients.

What I don't understand about the idea was why would anyone visit a page full of ads? Did the owner sign deals with the major browser vendors at the time?

I really, why would anyone want to visit a page with nothing more than 1,000,000 pixels of ads?

Because of the novelty of some unknown person selling pixels for a dollar each and making a million dollars. I think this was covered on the Today show and other media outlets IIRC.

for scammy SEO. it was linked everywhere so it was good ranking. most ads are the usual cheap casino rolex click here kind of thing.

Here is another writeup:

http://www.sexeys.somerset.sch.uk/alumni/alex-tew

…and our old school is really called Sexey's.

I quite liked http://yournameontoast.com/

Perhaps because of the manual typography involved and the general silliness.

Almost all of the links in the advertisements seem dead, sadly.

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.

Why do you assume it is a bad idea? People are still clicking on the links, right?

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.

This was an early example of internet crowd funding.

I don't think so. He just got a bunch of customers to pay for advertisement on his site. Like any business supported on ads, basically.

True, but you could also say he ran a campaign to crowdfund his education and offered rewards in the form of pixels.

The lines between crowdfunding, accepting preorders, and just running a business are fairly blurry.

The Million Dollar Homepage was my inspiration for a world homepage: every person in the world could sign up for "their pixel". each pixel on the page would be a link to their blog or email address. This idea is more odds a thought experiment about the scale of one web page than a real site. :)

Wow, even the "1000 limited edition poster prints". Crazy. I remember it when it came out. It was a success because of media attention. It sparkled a "gold rush" to buy these pixels while they lasted. Sometimes people do crazy things. :)

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/

Nostalgic!

Btw how did it go viral back then? Curious. Was it cause of his story? Pay for tuition.

I seem to remember a lot of mailing lists discussing it, which is how I believe things went viral certainly in the 90s.

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.

[1] http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/press.php

Wow... this seems like yesterday for me. Scary how fast things are moving!

time is indeed flying. even 2001 seems like yesterday for me.

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!

My ad still works. Although I always have trouble finding it since it was just a 10x10.

How many clicks did you get ?

Man I didn't realize, I am getting old! That was in 2005.... :(

I remember this and the million and one copies that came after it.

Love how a good few of the adverts are just for more pixel ad pages

A miniature dot com boom: this company sells so much ad space -> let's be like them -> need marketing -> let's put an ad on their page!

I guess not entirely good way to advertise since quite a lot of them are either non existent or the domain shows something completely different :D

Vaguely inspired this site I made: http://humbit.com/humbit.php

Wow, I was 13 at the time this came out and I feel like it was yesterday. I guess I really am an internet veteran. :)

How many of those companies/URLs are still in business? Anyone want to crunch that out? :-)

Errors found while checking this document as HTML 4.01 Transitional!

Result: 3618 Errors, 3360 warning(s)

I hope his links are rel=nofollow otherwise he might be penalized by Google (sarcasm)

I randomly clicked on three ads and they all led nowhere.

2/10 will not click again

what's the catch here ? why would any one pay 100$ for 10x10 area on that homepage ? was it already having a massive traffic or something ?

But did you guys find Waldo? ;)

I'm 12, what is this

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.

I might as well add my product to the discussion : http://www.theonemillioneuromap.com/

Hurry up, there's only 999996 pins left ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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