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From pixels to riches The Million Dollar Homepage
For more than a decade, legions of entrepreneurs and marketing wizards have wrecked their brains to find a way for making big money on the Internet. Most of them just ended up with a big headache. The few who succeeded required a long breath until they cashed in on their e-business ideas. A British student has now demonstrated that you can make a million dollars on the Web within four months. The stunning success story commenced in Cricklade, Wiltshire, on a mild August night, when 21-year-old student to-be Alex Tew considered the significant cost of studying business management at Nottingham University, which he had decided to begin in October. Appalled by the prospect of finishing his studies with a huge debt, Alex started to brainstorm on how to make plenty of money in the shortest-possible time. “I was up late with my notepad, and I wrote down the question ‘how could I become a millionaire?’ and 20 minutes later I had the answer,” Alex Tew remembered. The answer he found was simple and ingenious: set up a website called “The Million Dollar Homepage”, which contains exactly one million pixels, and sell the pixels for one dollar each to anyone who wants them. Advertisers must buy at least 100 pixels in order to have a tiny 10x10 pixel icon, which they can then use to display an image linked to their website. On 23 August 2005, www.milliondollarhomepage.com went online. Alex Tew sold the first pixel blocks to some friends. Once sales had topped 1,000 dollar, he used the money to pay for a press release, which was picked up by the BBC in September. From there, word on the Million Dollar Homepage spread with the speed of light through the Internet. Within the first four weeks, Alex sold more than 300,000 pixels. The number of unique visitors rose to 150,000 and 200,000 per week. By 27 December, 904,000 pixels were sold, and on 1 January, Alex announced that the last 1,000 pixels would be auctioned via e-Bay. On 13 January, the auction was closed. A businessman from Brooklyn, NY, who runs an online store selling diet-related products, won the last pixels at the respectable price of 38,100 dollar. Why would anybody in his right mind spend a five-digit dollar amount for pixels on a web page plastered with tiny advertising banners? Here is the explanation by Alex Tew: “Things that are unique and novel naturally get talked about, if they’re interesting. My crazy idea to make money seems to have caught people’s imagination.” The explanation by Professor Martin Binks, director of the Nottingham University Institute for Entrepreneurial Innovation is in line with Alex’s view: “I think advertisers have been attracted to it by its novelty and by the curiosity factor. Those that are buying space have realised that the site has become a phenomenon and people are flocking to have a look at it; that makes the advertising good value for money.” The testimonials on the Million Dollar Homepage confirm that a number of advertisers have gained a considerable increase of page visits and online sales from buying pixels. The statement by Will Marston, Managing Director of Lollipop Animation in the UK, is representative for the enthusiastic feedback from advertisers who bought pixels: "Our hits have quadrupled, and our sales have gone through the roof. We only bought pixel space for a bit of fun, but now it's as though we're a part of Internet history." Apart from paying advertisers, the success of the Million Dollar Homepage attracted also less welcome forms of appreciation. On 12 January, the Million DollarHomepage.com became the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by malicious hackers, causing the site to be extremely slow loading or completely unavailable for several days. Alex Tew claims that this hacker attack was accompanied by an extortionist demand for 50,000 dollar ransom. Although he didn’t have a business customer package from his web provider, he managed to get out of this attack without paying. Some sceptical bloggers suspect that the whole story was made up in order to fuel public interest. Less nasty than hacker attacks are the hundreds of copycat websites who want to cash in on the same idea. Alex Tew has only mild contempt for his imitators. In an interview, he said: “All the imitator sites mostly miss the point, though. They don't see that mine has only been successful because it was the first, it was unique. People take notice of things that are new and interesting, but why would anyone check out some of the 600 plus imitator sites? They probably won't make much money, but good luck to them!” It is indeed very unlikely that any of the free-riders will earn anything close to the million Alex made with his website. There remains the question what a 21-year-old does with so much money, apart from paying his tuition fees. His answer: “The first thing I bought was some new socks!” His favourite socks have a Space Invaders logo on them, which is made of the stuff his fortune is built on – pixels. Please send us your comments on this article. |
