…for and from the curious

The Milliondollarhomepage

It sounds like a fairy tale:

Alex Tew a 21 year old student from Nottingham (UK) decides he is too poor and want to do something about it. Within minutes he comes up with a plan: Setting up a barebones website and selling 1 million pixels at a price for a dollar per pixel (100 pixel minimum per buyer).

Besides the hosting and the setup of the website he only had one more expense: His family threw in a few hundred dollars to publish the professional distribution a press release about his plan. That was enough to ignite the fire. People started talking about the site in chat rooms and other online communities. The Milliondollarhomepage became talk of the Web. Guerilla marketing at its best.

It took a little over four months and the site was fully booked. The Milliondollarhomepage was launched on August 26, 2005 and the last pixels were sold on January 11th, 2006. The last 1000 pixels were auctioned on eBay for $38,100 US.

The idea sounded crazy enough for many advertiser to jump aboard. If you look at the Milliondollarhomepage you will see a lot of well know names combined with a lot of smaller companies. A very wide mix, almost like a snapshot of the entire web.

We applaud Alex Tew for his great idea. Unfortunately there are many mock-offs of this concept now. This was an original idea that worked once but I believe all the mock-offs should rather come up with their own concepts.