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The Million Dollar Homepage is a
website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wi ...
conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from
Wiltshire Wiltshire (; abbreviated Wilts) is a historic and ceremonial county in South West England with an area of . It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset to the southwest, Somerset to the west, Hampshire to the southeast, Gloucestershire ...
, England, to raise money for his
university education Higher education is tertiary education leading to award of an academic degree. Higher education, also called post-secondary education, third-level or tertiary education, is an optional final stage of formal learning that occurs after completi ...
. The home page consists of a million
pixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the ...
s arranged in a pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a
cursor Cursor may refer to: * Cursor (user interface), an indicator used to show the current position for user interaction on a computer monitor or other display device * Cursor (databases), a control structure that enables traversal over the records in ...
over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. ''
The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'' has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels. Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an
Internet phenomenon An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme ( ), is an idea, behavior, style, or image that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet ...
, with copycat websites emerging in response. The
Alexa Alexa may refer to: Technology *Amazon Alexa, a virtual assistant developed by Amazon * Alexa Internet, a defunct website ranking and traffic analysis service * Arri Alexa, a digital motion picture camera People * Alexa (name), a given name a ...
ranking of
web traffic Web traffic is the data sent and received by visitors to a website. Since the mid-1990s, web traffic has been the largest portion of Internet traffic. Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are ...
peaked at around 127; , it was 40,044. On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on
eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...
. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross. During the January 2006 auction, the website was subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) and ransom demand, which left it inaccessible to visitors for a week while its security system was upgraded. The
Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, ...
and
Wiltshire Constabulary Wiltshire Police, formerly known as Wiltshire Constabulary, is the territorial police force responsible for policing the county of Wiltshire (including the Borough of Swindon) in South West England. The force serves 722,000 people over an area ...
investigated the attack and extortion attempt. Tew dropped out of the business degree the site was set up to fund after one term. The Million Dollar Homepage was still receiving thousands of daily viewers in 2019, although by 2017, many of the website's links suffered from
link rot Link rot (also called link death, link breaking, or reference rot) is the phenomenon of hyperlinks tending over time to cease to point to their originally targeted file, web page, or server due to that resource being relocated to a new address ...
, which has caused the URLs to no longer function as originally intended.


History


Development

Alex Tew, a student from
Cricklade Cricklade is a town and civil parish on the River Thames in north Wiltshire, England, midway between Swindon and Cirencester. It is the first downstream town on the Thames. The parish population at the 2011 census was 4,227. History Cricklade ...
in Wiltshire, England, conceived The Million Dollar Homepage in August 2005 when he was 21 years old. He was about to begin a three-year Business Management course at the
University of Nottingham , mottoeng = A city is built on wisdom , established = 1798 – teacher training college1881 – University College Nottingham1948 – university status , type = Public , chancellor ...
, and was concerned that he would be left with a
student loan A student loan is a type of loan designed to help students pay for post-secondary education and the associated fees, such as tuition, books and supplies, and living expenses. It may differ from other types of loans in the fact that the interest r ...
that could take years to repay. As a money-raising idea, Tew decided to sell a million pixels on a website for $1 each; purchasers would add their own image,
logo A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wo ...
or advertisement, and have the option of including a hyperlink to their website. Pixels were sold for US dollars rather than UK pounds; the US has a larger online population than the UK, and Tew believed more people would relate to the concept if the pixels were sold in US currency. In 2005, the pound was strong against the dollar: £1 was worth approximately $1.80, and that cost per pixel may have been too expensive for many potential buyers. Tew's setup costs were 50, which paid for the registration of the domain name and a basic web-hosting package. The website went live on 26 August 2005. The
homepage A home page (or homepage) is the main web page of a website. The term may also refer to the start page shown in a web browser when the application first opens. Usually, the home page is located at the root of the website's domain or subdomain. ...
featured a
Web banner A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linkin ...
with the site's name and a pixel counter displaying the number of pixels sold, a navigation bar containing nine small links to the site's internal web pages, and an empty square grid of 1,000,000 pixels divided into 10,000 100-pixel blocks. Tew promised customers that the site would remain online for at least five years – that is, until at least 26 August 2010.


Pixel sales

Because individual pixels are too small to be seen easily, pixels were sold in 100-pixel "blocks" measuring pixels; the minimum price was thus $100. The first sale, three days after the site began operating, was to an online music website operated by a friend of Tew's. He bought 400 pixels in a block. After two weeks, Tew's friends and family members had purchased a total of 4,700 pixels. The site was initially marketed only through
word of mouth Word of mouth, or ''viva voce'', is the passing of information from person to person using oral communication, which could be as simple as telling someone the time of day. Storytelling is a common form of word-of-mouth communication where one pe ...
; however, after the site had made $1,000, a
press release A press release is an official statement delivered to members of the news media for the purpose of providing information, creating an official statement, or making an announcement directed for public release. Press releases are also considere ...
was sent out that was picked up by the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
. The technology news website
The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information te ...
featured two articles on The Million Dollar Homepage in September. By the end of the month, The Million Dollar Homepage had received $250,000 and was ranked Number 3 on Alexa Internet's list of "Movers and Shakers" behind the websites for Britney Spears and '' Photo District News''. On 6 October, Tew reported the site received 65,000 unique visitors; it received 1465
Digg Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launch ...
s, becoming one of the most Dugg links that week. Eleven days later, the number had increased to 100,000 unique visitors. On 26 October, two months after The Million Dollar Homepage was launched, more than 500,900 pixels had been sold to 1,400 customers. By New Year's Eve, Tew reported that the site was receiving hits from 25,000 unique visitors every hour and had an
Alexa Alexa may refer to: Technology *Amazon Alexa, a virtual assistant developed by Amazon * Alexa Internet, a defunct website ranking and traffic analysis service * Arri Alexa, a digital motion picture camera People * Alexa (name), a given name a ...
Rank of 127, and that 999,000 of the 1,000,000 pixels had been sold. On 1 January 2006, Tew announced that because the demand was so great for the last 1,000 pixels, "the most fair and logical thing" to do was auction them on
eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...
rather than lose "the integrity and degree of exclusivity intrinsic to the million-pixel concept" by launching a second Million Dollar Homepage. The auction lasted ten days and received 99 legitimate bids. Although bids were received for amounts as high as $160,109.99, many were either retracted by the bidders or cancelled as hoaxes. "I actually contacted the people by phone and turns out they weren't serious, which is fairly frustrating, so I removed those bidders at the last minute", said Tew. The winning bid was $38,100, placed by MillionDollarWeightLoss.com, an online store selling diet-related products. Tew remarked that he had expected the final bid amount to be higher due to the media attention. The Million Dollar Homepage made a gross total of $1,037,100 in five months. After costs, taxes and a donation to
The Prince's Trust The Prince's Trust ( cy, Ymddiriedolaeth y Tywysog) is a charity in the United Kingdom founded in 1976 by King Charles III (then Prince of Wales) to help vulnerable young people get their lives on track. It supports 11-to-30-year-olds who are u ...
, a charity for young people, Tew expected his
net Net or net may refer to: Mathematics and physics * Net (mathematics), a filter-like topological generalization of a sequence * Net, a linear system of divisors of dimension 2 * Net (polyhedron), an arrangement of polygons that can be folded up ...
income to be $650,000–$700,000. Pixel purchasers included Bonanza Gift Shop, Panda Software, the producers of '' Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price'', British Schools Karting Championship, Book of Cool,
Orange Orange most often refers to: *Orange (fruit), the fruit of the tree species '' Citrus'' × ''sinensis'' ** Orange blossom, its fragrant flower *Orange (colour), from the color of an orange, occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum * ...
, ''
The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' (f ...
'', Cheapflights.com, Schiffer Publishing, Rhapsody,
Tenacious D Tenacious D is an American comedy rock duo formed in Los Angeles, California in 1994. It was founded by actors Jack Black and Kyle Gass, who were members of The Actors' Gang theater company at the time. The duo's name is derived from "ten ...
, GoldenPalace.com,
888.com 888 Holdings PLC, () known commonly as 888, is a public company which owns several popular gambling brands and websites, including 888sport, 888casino and 888poker. 888 is based in Gibraltar. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a con ...
and other
online casino Online casinos, also known as virtual casinos or Internet casinos, are online versions of traditional ("brick and mortar") casinos. Online casinos enable gamblers to play and wager on casino games through the Internet. It is a prolific form of ...
s,
Independiente Records Independiente is a British independent record label formed in 1997 after Andy Macdonald sold his first label Go! Discs to PolyGram in 1996 for a reported £30 million. The label, which is currently dormant, is a division of Concord Music. The ...
,
Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...
, small privately owned businesses, and companies offering get-rich-quick schemes,
online dating service Online dating, also known as Internet dating, Virtual dating, or Mobile app dating, is a relatively recent method used by people with a goal of searching for and interacting with potential romantic or sexual partners, via the internet. An onlin ...
s,
personal loan Personal may refer to: Aspects of persons' respective individualities * Privacy * Personality * Personal, personal advertisement, variety of classified advertisement used to find romance or friendship Companies * Personal, Inc., a Washington, ...
s, free samples,
website design Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code a ...
s and holidays.


DDoS attack

On 7 January 2006, three days before the auction of the final 1,000 pixels was due to end, Tew received an e-mail from an organisation called "The Dark Group", and was told The Million Dollar Homepage would become the victim of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) if a ransom of $5,000 was not paid by 10 January. Believing the threat to be a hoax, he ignored it, but a week later received a second e-mail threat: "Hello u website is under us to stop the DDoS send us 50000$." Again, he ignored the threat, and the website was flooded with extra traffic and e-mails, causing it to
crash Crash or CRASH may refer to: Common meanings * Collision, an impact between two or more objects * Crash (computing), a condition where a program ceases to respond * Cardiac arrest, a medical condition in which the heart stops beating * Couch su ...
. "I haven't replied to any of them as I don't want to give them the satisfaction and I certainly don't intend to pay them any money. What is happening to my website is like terrorism. If you pay them, new attacks will start," Tew said. The website was inaccessible to visitors for a week until the host server upgraded the security system, and filtered traffic through anti-DDoS
software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...
.
Wiltshire Constabulary Wiltshire Police, formerly known as Wiltshire Constabulary, is the territorial police force responsible for policing the county of Wiltshire (including the Borough of Swindon) in South West England. The force serves 722,000 people over an area ...
's Hi-Tech Crime Unit and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, ...
(FBI) were called to investigate the extortion and attack; they believed it originated in Russia.


Reception

Following the September press release that first brought attention to the site, The Million Dollar Homepage was featured in numerous British media articles and programmes. By November 2005, the website had received attention from ''
The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'' and media around the world. During a week-long trip to the US, Tew gave several media interviews. The concept was described as "simple and brilliant", "clever", "ingenious", and "a unique platform or advertisingwhich is also a bit of fun". Professor Martin Binks, director of the Nottingham University Institute for Entrepreneurial Innovation, said, "It is brilliant in its simplicity ... advertisers have been attracted to it by its novelty ... the site has become a phenomenon." ''
Popular Mechanics ''Popular Mechanics'' (sometimes PM or PopMech) is a magazine of popular science and technology, featuring automotive, home, outdoor, electronics, science, do-it-yourself, and technology topics. Military topics, aviation and transportation o ...
'' said: "There's no content. No cool graphics, giveaways or steamy Paris Hilton videos for viewers to salivate over. Imagine a TV channel that shows nothing but commercials, a magazine with nothing but ads. That's The Million Dollar Homepage. An astonishing example of the power of
viral marketing Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way tha ...
." Don Oldenburg of ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
'' was one of the few without praise for the site, calling it a "cheap, mind-bogglingly lucrative marketing monstrosity, an advertising badlands of spam, banner ads and pop-ups." Oldenburg continues, "it looks like a bulletin board on designer steroids, an advertising train wreck you can't ''not'' look at. It's like getting every pop-up ad you ever got in your life, at once. It's the Internet equivalent of suddenly feeling like you want to take a shower." As the final pixels were being auctioned, Tew was interviewed on ''
Richard & Judy ''Richard & Judy'' (also known as ''Richard & Judy's New Position'') is a British television chat show presented by the married couple Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan. The show originally aired on Channel 4 from 26 November 2001 to 22 Augus ...
'', and profiled in the online
BBC News Magazine BBC News Online is the website of BBC News, the division of the BBC responsible for newsgathering and production. It is one of the most popular news websites, with 1.2 billion website visits in April 2021, as well as being used by 60% of the ...
. ''The Wall Street Journal'' wrote about The Million Dollar Homepage and its impact on the Internet community. "Mr. Tew himself has taken on celebrity status in the Internet community ... the creative juice ... paints an interesting picture of online entrepreneurship".


Legacy

Tew dropped out of the business degree the site was set up to fund after one term. In 2008, Tew founded Popjam, an Internet aggregation and social networking business. On May 4, 2012, Tew co-founded software company Calm with Michael Acton Smith. As of 2016, Tew was working as an entrepreneur in
San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
. As of 2017, only the main page of the website was available, with all sub pages returning a 404 Not Found message. A 2017 study by
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
found that the links on the still-live main page of the site demonstrated a considerable degree of link rot. Of the 2,816 original links, 547 (342,000 pixels, sold for $342,000) were dead, and 489 (145,000 pixels, sold for $145,000) redirected to a different domain. The report stated that, of the remaining links, that "the majority do not seem to reflect their original purpose". By April 2019, according to the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
, approximately 40% of the site's links were suffering from link rot. The site was still receiving several thousands of viewers per day.


Similar websites

Many other sites sold advertising by pixels. Tew said of the sites, "
hey Hey or Hey! may refer to: Music * Hey (band), a Polish rock band Albums * ''Hey'' (Andreas Bourani album) or the title song (see below), 2014 * ''Hey!'' (Julio Iglesias album) or the title song, 1980 * ''Hey!'' (Jullie album) or the title s ...
popped up almost immediately; now there are hundreds of Web sites selling pixels. The copycats are all competing with each other." "...they have very little ads, therefore I guess it's not going too well for them. The idea only works once and relies on novelty ... any copy-cat sites will only have pure comedy value, whereas mine possibly has a bit of comedy PLUS some actual pull in advertising dollars ... so I say good luck to the imitators!"


See also

* Crowdfunding * r/place


References


External links


The Million Dollar Homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Million Dollar Homepage, The Internet properties established in 2005 Internet memes Online advertising 2005 establishments in the United Kingdom