The ASCII Million Dollar Page | Hacker News Reader

The ASCII Million Dollar Page

asciimilliondollarpage.com

33 pointsbtw035 comments

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$20 per character

Good luck with that ;)

The page even says that the "First screen is for internal use, not for sale" lol

Dude must have cash enough, that's $40K down the tubes right there.

Hey, I've seen weirder stuff on the internet where someone actually made money. You never know :)

Hilarious!

For those who aren't familiar with it, it's a spoof of this page: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

Which although seems pretty pointless, got a ton of publicity a while ago.

EDIT: and apparently actually made its author a million dollars!

The poor thing about the actual million dollar homepage is the creator (a university student trying to make some money to pay of his student debt) then got DDOS attacked to oblivion and had to spend a large amount of the money trying to keep the site up. The DDOS attackers obviously knew he had come in to a large amount of money and held him to ransom.

I hadn’t heard about that. Sounds like the attack itself and the resulting investigation weren’t very successful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage#DDo...

I bet if he had seeded it to make it look like a few people had already paid, he might have made some sales by now, joke site or not.

I recently launched a website with a gatekeeping fee pegged to the number of users (fee goes up $0.001 per user) and it surprised me how many people assumed that I started by charging $0.00. Do you really want to be the first paying user of any service?

I like that idea, it combines 'act now while it's still cheap', with the idea that the site may not be as useful until it has a certain number of users, and thus it makes sense to charge less to early users.

The original fitted in approximately 1 browser screen. This ASCII one involves scrolling.

I can't avoid hating everything that is for pure money making and no user value creation. It is also an advice for startups.

The site has the potential value to bring traffic to advertised web sites.

Well...he's made 20 bucks.

40 now, seems like there is a 'Z' and an '@' there now :D Seriously even if he makes 100K, heck 10K im going to label this guy as one of my idols LOL ...

> Aug 16, 2009

Inspired by yourworldoftext.appspot.com ?

I believe you may be right.

I hope they know rel="nofollow" has to be added to all those links.

It doesn't matter anyway, Goog won't crawl more than 100 links on a page.

I would have bought into that if only he'd done a Flash version.

This site looks easy to maintain.

No Unicode?!

Actually ..

  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

pfff

In order to be original, you have to be, well, original.

Fail.

Oh, come on, you're just jealous ;)

I don't know how often this has been done again, the first time it was a pretty good thing though, one of those 'why didn't I think of that' things.

Makes you wonder though, there must be some other immensely viral idea that can make you money in a short time lurking somewhere waiting to be discovered.

It would help if he made it readable though...

I was one of the many that said to myself "why didn't I think of that" the first time.

Not this time.

I'll give you one original idea to make you instant millionaire on the web.

- Start with a thousand dollars

- Every week, ask the wisdom of crowds for a way to double that purchasing, reselling, investing in anything the majority decides.

- Repeat ten times till you get to a million dollars.

- Keep the crowds amused with your vicissitudes in a daily blog.

- Profit!

Remember the red-paper-clip guy? something like that but the audience decides what to do with the money, and the whole intent is to double it every time.

Show the world we can be millionaires by investing wisely following the wisdom of crowds.

For example, first week buy $200 t-shirts for $5 and resell them for $10.

Second week, buy an old car for $2000 and resell it for $4000.

Those are just stupid examples, the audience should decide wiser.

Imagination is all you need to be a millionaire.

And originality...

I challenge you to execute your idea :)

It's a good one but I can see a pitfall:

You might buy something that you find is unsellable, killing momentum.

A friend of mine - Joyce - had a good idea and put it in to practice, it was called jam-trading.

In the Netherlands the traffic jams are terrible and people end up next to each other, often for long times.

So she devised this game (not without danger to passing motorcycles), take anything from your car and try to trade it with the people next to you for something that you value more.

When the cars move again you get parked next to your 'next victim', rinse & repeat.

They started out with a fairly squishy apple (the food kind, not the digital kind), and managed to trade it all the way up to a notebook and a pretty neat pen over a stretch of about 5 kilometers.

A 1:20 fold increase in value or so.

Not bad for a simple idea...

"You might buy something that you find is unsellable, killing momentum."

You can't allow that to happen, if you do you fail at the game.

You have to study all submitted options and pick the best according to all variables involved, time included.

If you get enough publicity perhaps Mercedes will give you a car for half the price so you can sell it quick, going from 50k to 100k in days. Or any other sponsors, Rolex may help you jump from 5K to 10K. Harley-Davidson from 10K to 20k, and so on.

Free publicity for the seller and for the buyer if they choose so.

Luck may be on your side...

This plan sounds like it rests on the classic answer to how to make a million: "first, get a million page views"

I have those, now tell me what to do next :)

"Beware of people giving you advice that they themselves do not follow".

I figure if you tell people how to go and make a million you had better made a few of those yourself.

Here's a simple idea to make you an instant thousandaire and you don't even need a computer...

Purchase a mailing list of 4,096 football bettors.

Then start mailing postcards every week proclaiming that you have a system and a newsletter absolutely positively guaranteeing at least one "Lock of the Week".

Week 1 - Mail a postcard to 2,048 selecting the Tennessee Titans as the "Lock of the Week". Mail the other 2,048 a postcard selecting the Buffalo Bills as the "Lock of the Week". Keep only the 2,048 names whose team actually won.

Week 2 - Mail 1,024 postcards with one "Lock of the Week" and 1,024 with the other team as the "Lock of the Week".

Repeat for 3 more weeks.

By the time the season starts, you will have mailed 5 consecutive correct "Locks of the Week" to 128 bettors. The probability of this was (.5)^5 or .03125. Damn, you're good!

Now sell those 128 bettors your Absolutely Positively Guaranteed "Lock of the Week" Newsletter for $1,000 but only if they buy before Sunday.

If half the bettors buy your newsletter then your income will be $64,000 with a printing and mailing cost of less than $2,000. Not bad.

hehe, I heard about that one on a slightly different tune, send your letter to 'investors' and do it 10 times in a row (so 2047 letters in total).

Then go to the last investor with an investment proposal for a lot of $ and disappear into the sunset with the loot :)

Professor Pigskin, is that you?

Make sure to list that on your alternative ideas on the YC app!

Yep, that is an example Nasim Taleb uses in Fooled by Randomness

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