Yet Another Million Dollar Home Page
By Michael Pollock in Business Development
You’ve probably heard about The Million Dollar Home Page. If not, it’s a project that was launched by a 21 year-old college student named Alex Tew of Wiltshire, England. The idea was ridiculously and embarassingly simple: make a million dollars by selling advertising space at $1 per pixel on The Million Dollar Homepage. Ridiculous right? Think again. As of today, Alex has only sold 999,000 pixels. For you mathophobes out there, that’s $999,000 earned in less than 5 months. The last 1000 pixels will go to the highest bidder on ebay (current bid: 153,100).
It doesn’t end there, however. Alex’s embarrassingly simple idea has been copied more than a few times by other folks hoping to milk the MDHP cash cow for all it’s worth. The latest copycat is Teresa Luquette, who created The Million Dollar Womens Homepage this past November. Her earnings from the copycat effort so far: $133,300. Not bad for a couple of months and a knockoff idea.
All copycat scorn aside, the moral of the story is this. Originality is a beautiful, but often over-rated ideal. The smart money invests in an idea that’s been proven to work.
(via Denise Wakeman)
On Jan 10, 2006, JFR said:
It’s getting ridiculous. Here you have a “web 2.0″ twist: 1000tags.com
At least these guys seem honest and bring up an interesting question regarding the future of folksonomies as an advertising medium (cause pixels surely won’t be). They even suggest Google might start offering paid tag clouds instead of text ads. Now that I liked :-)
There was also a guy who opened a blog and rented space on his blog, aiming for another million bucks. Forgot the URL but reading his FAQ was a riot, because there you really could see he was virtually copying everything the milliondollarpage dude did.
On Jan 11, 2006, Jim Logan said:
This is one of those things you kick yourself in the rear for not having thought of it first. It’s better than the pet rock. I wonder if there’s a market for a pixel sale to bald, slighly over weight, middle aged men in need of a good night’s sleep?
On Jan 4, 2007, Giorgio said:
Yet another MDHP.
Since I already had a web directory and free classifieds site, it was relatively easy to make a free pixel page to show this data in a crossword puzzle format: http://www.sywords.com