Saturday, July 18, 2009

The Million Dollar Homepage

One dollar per pixel may have been a good buy for advertising space on
the Internet, because three year's later you can still go to the
Million Dollar Home Page (http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com) and
click on a square to be linked to an advertiser's webpage.

The webpage was the brain child of Alex Tew, a freshman at the
University of Nottingham, in England, who wanted a way to pay for his
education.

It is simply a grid of 10,000 boxes, each 100 pixels in size, filled
with barely legible advertisements. Businesses and some individuals
bought space on the grid at a price of $1 per pixel, hoping their ads
would prove lucrative if the site became an Internet phenomenon. And
it did.

Only about four months after its conception in 2006, the Million
Dollar Home Page sold out and made Tew $1 million. Tew thought it
would take three years to sell all the spaces.

Advertisers on the site include a number of fledgling poker rooms and
online retailers. But the grid also features some strange characters,
like a person who bills himself as the Rich Jerk. And the site's
advertisers include a few noteworthy names, like the Golden Palace
Casino -- a champion of marketing stunts that has paid hefty fees for
items like a toasted cheese sandwich said to bear an image of the
Virgin Mary.

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