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.
But yeah, links on the internet survive much longer than the sites they point to; when I am hunting for information on something, I encounter at least one dead link per hour.
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!
I'm English and typically squeamish about money but suffice to say, the site really did make a million dollars (before tax). Alex paid me generously for my services and it paid for a good chunk of the deposit on my house!
Alex has gone on to do a lot of cool stuff. I'm currently principal software developer at Box UK and involved with tech meetups and open source. Oh, I do still rock the human beatbox!
Who was the first human in space? Who was the second?
Who was the first human to orbit the Earth? Who was the second?
Who was the first human to set foot on the moon? The second? The third?
I really, why would anyone want to visit a page with nothing more than 1,000,000 pixels of ads?
The lines between crowdfunding, accepting preorders, and just running a business are fairly blurry.
Btw how did it go viral back then? Curious. Was it cause of his story? Pay for tuition.
There's an incomplete list of coverage he received on the site [1] but it doesn't include TV or radio, which was a fair amount too from memory.
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
After a few minutes searching I was only able to find one site that still worked.
A guy back in 2005 came up with a get rich quick scheme where he sold 1 million pixels of ad space on his domain to pay for his college education. You'd pay $1 per pixel of ad space until they were all gone. It got a ton of hype and was pretty internet-famous for awhile, so the guy did indeed sell all of the space.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.sexeys.somerset.sch.uk/alumni/alex-tew
…and our old school is really called Sexey's.
Perhaps because of the manual typography involved and the general silliness.
Result: 3618 Errors, 3360 warning(s)
2/10 will not click again
Hurry up, there's only 999996 pins left ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
