from Hacker News

The Million Dollar Homepage (2005)

by tomthorns on 8/1/13, 10:37 AM with 82 comments

  • by gavd on 8/1/13, 11:42 AM

    I was the developer who wrote the PHP that this site ran on. I knew Alex from Humanbeatbox.com - we were both beatboxers (known as A-Plus and BeatMuppet) who met at some jams. One night he rang me up saying that he had this site and it was getting a bit out of hand!

    Initially he was managing the orders himself and manually updating the site, but as the media coverage grew and the traffic picked up, it was no longer manageable. I wrote a simple system to add, remove and move the pixels and helped with the orders.

    Eventually, he had to take a couple of other people on to help with the orders - it really was a media storm as Alex was on TV and stuff!

    It was a crazy few weeks but I'm very glad to have been a part of this!

  • by mixmax on 8/1/13, 11:20 AM

    An explanation for those who've never seen this before:

    A long long time ago on an Internet far from here a young man had an idea. His idea was simple but genius. He would make a homepage (as they were called back then) with a grid of 100 by 100 squares each ten pixels across. Each square could hold an image 10x10 pixels. One million pixels.

    Back when we didn't have retina displays and Stallmann was still young designers thought 10x10 pixels was plenty to make a pretty picture. You could then buy a square for one hundred dollars; a dollar a pixel. And if people clicked on the pretty picture you had made in your square they would be taken to your homepage. If you had lots of money or worked for one of those new dot-com's you could buy more than one square so your designer could make a bigger picture.

    Now, you can probably guess why it was called the million Dollar Homepage (Hint 1000 x 1000 = 1 million), and as you can see all the squares were sold so the architect reached his goal, won his bet and retreated back to the matrix to devise new ingenious devious ideas.

    Edit: changed ten dollars to one hundred dollars - thanks for pointing it out jgrubb.

  • by PaulJoslin on 8/1/13, 12:17 PM

    The idea of it was a smart idea, but the real reason for the success was the marketability of the story behind it.

    In a world of internet before everything went viral, this story was just 'crazy enough' to essentially go viral. The concept of a page being worth a million dollars both in a literal and theoretical sense made this quite a popular link to share in the initial phase (when the site was empty apart from a couple of adverts).

    This then drove a viral / media engine (including television / radio and word of mouth) which suddenly actually made the pixels on the page worth something!

    Companies now flocked to get adverts on the site which was getting a large number of genuine traffic / media attention and thus the media cycle continued (as it was now a profitable, extremely successful site) - this in turn finished when the page was full and months later everyone lost interest.

    Unfortunately, I think many of the copy cat sites didn't understand why this was successful in the first place. It was a clever new idea, which was likely to get press attention for being so 'unique' / 'clever' - the copy cats were unlikely to ever get the same 'viral' effect, so were never going to become successful like the original site.

    If I remember correctly, even the founder himself tried to spin off a second site based on the same concept with limited success - mainly because people had seen it before.

  • by forcer on 8/1/13, 11:15 AM

    That was my first "business idea". After seeing it take off so rapidly. I setup first clone in my country and donated all profits to charity. It was not much, about $2000 in total but I learned a ton of useful stuff which helped me later to progress to bigger and more profitable things. What I learned back then is that if something works in one country, you can usually replicate it with some success elsewhere. I have taken that lesson and most of my successes in recent years been due to this "copy" strategy.

  • by Shivetya on 8/1/13, 11:06 AM

  • by wlj on 8/1/13, 11:40 AM

    I actually advertised on this when it came out. $100 for the little zebra print square, top left corner, 2nd row down, "YOUR OWN PHOTO WEBSITE" (just to the right of 'Bingo').

    Was fun to be a part of it going viral at the time.

    EDIT: Incidentally, the amount of spam I've received since for clone sites has been staggering.

  • by johnpolacek on 8/1/13, 2:27 PM

    Remember One Red Paperclip? That was a good one too (2006) http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com

  • by user24 on 8/1/13, 11:19 AM

    Forgot all about this. I toyed with the idea of buying some ad space when there was still some space available. In fact I remember when it was 80% free still.

    I think I'm right in saying he went on to try another iteration of the pixel idea; http://www.pixelotto.com

    By his twitter, it seems he's now running an iPhone meditation app at http://calm.com

  • by pbhjpbhj on 8/1/13, 2:54 PM

    http://validator.w3.org/checklink?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.milli...

    W3 Link Validator.

    List of broken links and other issues

    There are issues with the URLs listed below. The table summarizes the issues and suggested actions by HTTP response status code.

    Code Occurrences What to do

    (N/A) 24 The link was not checked due to robots exclusion rules. Check the link manually, and see also the link checker documentation on robots exclusion.

    (N/A) 110 The hostname could not be resolved. Check the link for typos.

    400 4 This is usually the sign of a malformed URL that cannot be parsed by the server. Check the syntax of the link.

    403 12 The link is forbidden! This needs fixing. Usual suspects: a missing index.html or Overview.html, or a missing ACL.

    404 20 The link is broken. Double-check that you have not made any typo, or mistake in copy-pasting. If the link points to a resource that no longer exists, you may want to remove or fix the link.

    405 2 The server does not allow HTTP HEAD requests, which prevents the Link Checker to check the link automatically. Check the link manually.

    406 9 The server isn't capable of responding according to the Accept* headers sent. This is likely to be a server-side issue with negotiation.

    500 14 This is a server side problem. Check the URI.

    503 1 The server cannot service the request, for some unknown reason.

  • by ars on 8/1/13, 11:35 AM

    The most interesting thing about this is how many of the links don't go anywhere anymore.

    After a few minutes searching I was only able to find one site that still worked.

  • by gavinjoyce on 8/1/13, 12:01 PM

    I purchased one of the first blocks, the Irish flag in the top left. It brought a steady stream of useless traffic, unsurprisingly.

  • by dj64 on 8/2/13, 8:38 PM

    We are actually creating a page similar to this for our clients. It will be live in a few days. We had a client directory but couldn't fit everyone on one page. So we decided to create smaller boxes for each clients. All of our clients will be on the same page and are encouraged to do business with each other and promote the page. Remember, hundreds of millions of people have come online in the past 5-10 years. And the key is not "copying" the exact idea but learning from and adapting all the models in the marketplace to create new projects. Ours is already selling but (BUT!)it is because we are already connected to these people (creatives, business owners, etc.) and we're not out to create a gimmick but simply to connect clients and friends of clients.

  • by aroman on 8/1/13, 12:50 PM

    What I don't understand about the idea was why would anyone visit a page full of ads? Did the owner sign deals with the major browser vendors at the time?

    I really, why would anyone want to visit a page with nothing more than 1,000,000 pixels of ads?

  • by darrhiggs on 8/1/13, 11:39 AM

    Here is another writeup:

    http://www.sexeys.somerset.sch.uk/alumni/alex-tew

    …and our old school is really called Sexey's.

  • by keithpeter on 8/1/13, 11:43 AM

    I quite liked http://yournameontoast.com/

    Perhaps because of the manual typography involved and the general silliness.

  • by nwh on 8/1/13, 11:55 AM

    Almost all of the links in the advertisements seem dead, sadly.

  • by RealGeek on 8/1/13, 11:10 AM

    This was an early example of internet crowd funding.

  • by cpeterso on 8/1/13, 3:33 PM

    The Million Dollar Homepage was my inspiration for a world homepage: every person in the world could sign up for "their pixel". each pixel on the page would be a link to their blog or email address. This idea is more odds a thought experiment about the scale of one web page than a real site. :)

  • by simonebrunozzi on 8/1/13, 3:59 PM

    Wow, even the "1000 limited edition poster prints". Crazy. I remember it when it came out. It was a success because of media attention. It sparkled a "gold rush" to buy these pixels while they lasted. Sometimes people do crazy things. :)

  • by iliaznk on 8/1/13, 11:12 AM

    Oh, yeah... good old days. Then the guy also launched a pixel lotto something and made another 250K, by the way. Now he's working here http://www.calm.com/

  • by BuddhaSource on 8/1/13, 11:28 AM

    Nostalgic!

    Btw how did it go viral back then? Curious. Was it cause of his story? Pay for tuition.

  • by samengland on 8/1/13, 12:50 PM

    Wow... this seems like yesterday for me. Scary how fast things are moving!

  • by kingofspain on 8/1/13, 12:40 PM

    At least one of the ads still works. The place I worked at back then jumped on it early (maybe only 9 or 10 other ads at that point). They paid more for a few pixels than I earned that month!

  • by xplorer on 8/1/13, 12:08 PM

    Man I didn't realize, I am getting old! That was in 2005.... :(

  • by alexchamberlain on 8/1/13, 11:07 AM

    I remember this and the million and one copies that came after it.

  • by Dusko on 8/1/13, 11:16 AM

    I guess not entirely good way to advertise since quite a lot of them are either non existent or the domain shows something completely different :D

  • by jere on 8/1/13, 12:42 PM

    Vaguely inspired this site I made: http://humbit.com/humbit.php

  • by chatmasta on 8/1/13, 4:48 PM

    Wow, I was 13 at the time this came out and I feel like it was yesterday. I guess I really am an internet veteran. :)

  • by segmondy on 8/1/13, 1:32 PM

    How many of those companies/URLs are still in business? Anyone want to crunch that out? :-)

  • by talmand on 8/1/13, 3:56 PM

    Errors found while checking this document as HTML 4.01 Transitional!

    Result: 3618 Errors, 3360 warning(s)

  • by gscott on 8/1/13, 2:46 PM

    I hope his links are rel=nofollow otherwise he might be penalized by Google (sarcasm)

  • by runn1ng on 8/1/13, 11:12 AM

    I randomly clicked on three ads and they all led nowhere.

    2/10 will not click again

  • by level09 on 8/1/13, 12:50 PM

    what's the catch here ? why would any one pay 100$ for 10x10 area on that homepage ? was it already having a massive traffic or something ?

  • by stwr on 8/1/13, 11:31 AM

    But did you guys find Waldo? ;)

  • by rnl on 8/1/13, 11:07 AM

    I'm 12, what is this

  • by marcelftw on 8/1/13, 12:13 PM

    I might as well add my product to the discussion : http://www.theonemillioneuromap.com/

    Hurry up, there's only 999996 pins left ¯\_(ツ)_/¯