Millio Dollar Homepage

[newhomeplans]

Has anyone heard of the “Million Dollar Homepage”? Apparently some 21 year old college student, Alex Tew; in England had started selling ad space on his web site for £1.00 per pixel. Supposedly hundreds of major international companies have purchased blocks of 100 pixels each and he is now a millionaire. There are 10,000 blocks. Is this a joke or just hype? What do you folks thinks about it?
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/index.php

Allen Jones
Salmon Arm BC

[cspelts]

Is this a joke or just hype?

It's both a joke and hype - and yet it's still very real! He came up with a simple idea, and figured out how to get some publicity. If you read his blog on the site, he was contacting journalists right at the start, before there was really even a story to report on.

I think it was brilliant - but even he admits it was a one-off deal. It's not likely that the thousands of sites that imitate his will be as successful. But, yeah, he had a billiant idea and make a million dollars. It's a great story!

[cspelts]

Is this a joke or just hype?

It's both a joke and hype - and yet it's still very real! He came up with a simple idea, and figured out how to get some publicity. If you read his blog on the site, he was contacting journalists right at the start, before there was really even a story to report on.

I think it was brilliant - but even he admits it was a one-off deal. It's not likely that the thousands of sites that imitate his will be as successful. But, yeah, he had a billiant idea and make a million dollars. It's a great story!

[coder]

it's real and we purchased pixels from him. Best investment we ever spent for the results we are getting.

[cspelts]

Best investment we ever spent for the results we are getting.

Can you post a link to the image you submitted? Or directions on how to find it on the real site? I'd love to see what you submitted - since it's working!

And congratulations! It's one of those things where you had to have a bit of imagination in order to buy in, and if you waited too long, it was too late. You were smart enough to get in - and I applaud that!

[chandrika]

it's real and we purchased pixels from him. Best investment we ever spent for the results we are getting.

What kind of results do you get. I have heard the story and think it is cool, but I am a bit in the dark as to how people actually get results from advertising on a site like that.

Have the results you have got come from people clicking through? Or from an increased pagerank for your site for the link from what must be a high ranked site?

I kind of thought that there must be so many links on one page that the chance of anyone clicking through wouldnt be that great. Is it that the site gets so much traffic that the odds are that even just a small percentage of the number that might click is still quite a large number?

Do people use the site as a kind of directory?

[SPC2]

The site doesn't pass any ranking juice. It was a one-off idea that worked brilliantly for the guy becuase he got the buzz, but none of the thousands of copycat sites have succeeded.

I imagine that the ads get clicks from the curiosity traffic that his site gets, but that'll fade away. I've clicked on plenty of ads there myself, but it was all just curiosity stuff.

[coder]

Can you post a link to the image you submitted? Or directions on how to find it on the real site? I'd love to see what you submitted - since it's working!

Sure it's towards the bottom left corner.
15 in from the left and 10 up. it's a 10x10 square.
small picture of the Phantom head. We originally got that location because when we purchased the spot there was nothing else around, this was back when Alex had less then 150,000 sold. we were averaging 120 visitors/day now we average 20/day.

Another bonus of purchasing pixels from him is that other sites list the sites that purchased pixels, hence more traffic and IBL's

[fuzzygay]

chandrika made a few very good points. My guess is that is just hype. There is no real value in a map like that, not from search engines point of view nor from regular visitors.

Let me explain: Search engines love text, the most you get (as advertiser) in the map ad is an "alt" tag, which can be classified as spam if abused. It is being said that search engines record only the very first 100 links in a given page, so 999,900 of those potential links will be ignored. On the other hand, what is a visitor going to do with one million (even one hundred thousand!) links in one single page? My guess is that just have fun clicking here and there, are these the targeted customers you will want visiting your site? You bet!

I do not see any value on these page, it will fade away as fast as it came up, I give it another three or so months to completely disappear from the landscape. Does anybody remember banners? Link farm banners? Of course current advertisers are looking a ton of traffic, I would ask: What about sales?

It was a nice idea, though!

[coder]

Let me explain: Search engines love text, the most you get (as advertiser) in the map ad is an "alt" tag, which can be classified as spam if abused. It is being said that search engines record only the very first 100 links in a given page, so 999,900 of those potential links will be ignored. On the other hand, what is a visitor going to do with one million (even one hundred thousand!) links in one single page? My guess is that just have fun clicking here and there, are these the targeted customers you will want visiting your site? You bet!

I do not see any value on these page, it will fade away as fast as it came up, I give it another three or so months to completely disappear from the landscape. Does anybody remember banners? Link farm banners? Of course current advertisers are looking a ton of traffic, I would ask: What about sales?

MSN lists the milliondollarhomepage as an IBL, are you saying that doesn't count???
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q....fireworks.com

also there is nowhere close to a million links. the site is full with somewhere around 2700 links. As for sales we can't sell fireworks online, so that isn't a factor for us. Since our link has been on hit site we've had over 7,000 visitors. Where else can you get 7,000 visitors for $100 in less then 4 months with a decent PR?