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Million Dollar Homepage pixel advertising

Seth Godin was right when he talked about purple cows. Do something extremely different and you have a chance. So some British kid took the idea of a spammy web site with nothing but ads and made it more useless than just about any other site on the web. And he made a million dollars on The Million Dollar Homepage.

"The lesson is that consumers are willing to go to good ideas, things that are unique, things that are novel," says Tew. "Rather than copy each other, spend time thinking up new things. . . . Creativity works."

I suppose it makes sense that mostly spammy web sites advertise on Alex Tew's spammy web site.

Buyers create little ads and choose open ad space on a 10,000-block grid. It's more than 2,000 advertisements, their dimensions ranging from postage-stamp size to a Tart N' Tiny candy (sorry, we couldn't think of anything else small enough to compare!), displaying words normally red-flagged by spam filters -- EZ Money! Hair loss? Poker! Loans! Get Girls! Freebies! Cancer Cure! Casino!

Some of the ads are illustrations or photos -- images of bikini babes, cartoons, Che Guevara, the British flag, a marijuana leaf, a bull's-eye, the dollar sign. When you drag the cursor over any one of them, a small read-out appears identifying the advertiser -- dating services, online poker, loan companies, bookies, bloggers, ring tone sellers, snoring remedies.

Within the first month the site was getting 200,000 unique visitors daily, and more than 3.2 million in the past two weeks, Tew says. "The more people talked about the site, the more money I made," says Tew. "And the more money I made, the more people talked about the site. It's a self-perpetuating idea."

You can see it at http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/but the last thousand pixels went up for auction on eBay and went over $150,000. Now an Ebay search for "million pixel" shows lots of imitators making a lot less money.

Posted by James Trotta at January 12, 2006 6:10 AM