Build a Million Dollar Homepage
Who wants to make a million dollars using the internet???
EVERYONE does, but not many people can actually pull this off. This is an old idea that has been floating around on the internet for several years now, but i’ve just recently discovered it. And I must say. It was an absolutely GENIUS IDEA that had been flawlessly executed.
If you haven’t seen this already, check out The Million Dollar Homepage.
The Idea
The website was conceived by Alex Tew, a young student from England, to raise money for his College education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks.
Purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them and an active URL for the images to be linked. A slogan is also displayed when visitors place their cursor over a link. The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels on the grid, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator.
The Result
The site was launched on August 26, 2005 and became an Internet phenomenon. The final pixel space on the site was sold in an ebay auction on January 11th, 2006 for a winning bid of $38,100. This brought the final gross income of the site to an astounding $1,037,100!
The website was a huge hit and spread virally. It received numerous media mentions and even reached an Alexa web traffic rank of #127 at its peak.
In only 6 short months, Alex was able to transform a blank website page into a webpage worth well over a million dollars. And it’s such a simple idea! This definitely goes to prove how effective a simple idea can be – if implemented in a creative fashion.
Now if only I could come up with a million dollar homepage idea…
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May 26th, 2010 at 7:22 am
[...] some extra money without actually ‘working’”. In 2005, Sadler was inspired by The Million Dollar Homepage to create “something … that would hopefully be as successful and, maybe down the road, [...]