The Million Dollar Idea

At a point in time when most people feel that the source of online income lies in selling pornography, unlicensed drugs or spamming emails, Alex Tew had substantiated how big money comes with a big idea, legitimately. Long before the current trend of online advertising, with a success rate of less than one per cent took over, a 21-year-old student of Wiltshire took to hosting a page through his million dollar idea. He formulated ‘The Million Dollar Homepage’ in August 2005.

Instead of taking a student loan that could take years to repay, Tew decided to sell a million pixels on a website for one dollar each. Also, ‘The Million Dollar Homepage’ is the pioneer in pixel advertising. On the homepage, purchasers would add their own image, logo or advertisement along with a hyperlink to their website. What is interesting is that the pixels were sold for US dollars rather than UK pounds. The insight here was that the US had a larger online population than the UK. Tew's setup costs were €50, which paid for the registration of the domain name and a basic web-hosting package. To see an individual pixel among a million pixels was close to impossible. Hence, the pixels were sold in 100-pixel blocks (10 × 10 pixels); the minimum price was thus $100. The website went live on August 26, 2005.

In its early stages, the site was marketed only through word of mouth. However, after making $1,000, BBC picked and spread the news. By the end of the month, the page had received $250,000 and was ranked third on Alexa Internet's list of ‘Movers and Shakers’, just after the websites for Britney Spears and Photo District News.

The page got so famous that big shots like Wal-Mart, Panda Software, Rhapsody, Yahoo!, Cheapflights.com and others advertised on it. The last thousand pixels of ‘The Million Dollar Homepage’ were auctioned on eBay. The ten-day auction ended with a winning bid of $38,100 by ‘MillionDollarWeightLoss.com’. With the page, Tew managed to earn a net income of close to $700,000 after charity.

The downfall

Just like every product reaches the end of Moore’s curve - almost a decade on, ‘The Million Dollar Homepage’ stands as a testimonial to the fragility of internet. Over 20 per cent of the links on the site are now dead. The rapid pace at which the internet has changed is well illustrated with the current condition of ‘The Million Dollar Homepage’, where 675 of the 3,066 redirect nowhere.

The website “provides an interesting window into the phenomenon of ‘link rot’, or hyperlinks that used to work but now point to dead pages,” writes Yanofsky of Quartz. “Our analysis found that 22 per cent of the Million Dollar Homepage’s pixels now fail to load a webpage when clicked.”

Using an automated testing process, by marking any page which does not load or takes longer than 10 seconds to load, as dead, Yanofsky justifies that the page is dying.

But the link rot is not confined to mere 20 per cent, a lot of links on the homepage which do load, redirect the users to a site very different from the one, which it was in 2005. For instance, ‘homebasedbusinessfreedom.com’ and ‘club-millionaire.com’ redirect to domain residents, companies which buy dead domains, and paste adverts over them. This suggests that the actual proportion of dead links is more than 20 per cent.

Tushar Kalawatia