Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Alan Levine aka CogDog barked this October 28th, 2005 1:05 pm
Alex Tew, 21, want to go to college, so he is earning it one pixel at a time on The Million Dollar Home Page:
The idea is simple: to try and make $1m (US) by selling 1,000,000 pixels for $1 each. Hence, ‘The Million Dollar Homepage”. The main motivation for doing this is to pay for my degree studies, because I don’t like the idea of graduating with a huge student debt. I know people who are paying off student loans 15-20 years after they graduated. Not a nice thought!
So, everyone is welcome to buy my pixels, which are available in 100-pixel ‘blocks’ (each measuring 10×10 pixels). You will see the homepage is divided into 10,000 of these 100-pixel blocks (hence there are 1,000,000 pixels in total). The reason for selling them in 100-pixel blocks is because anything smaller would be too small to display anything meaningful.
You can buy as many pixels as you like, as long as there are some available (see the live stats in the top right corner of the page). When you buy some pixels, you can then display an image/ad/logo of your choice in the space you have purchased. You can also have the image click through to your own website. However, no obscene or offensive images are allowed.
The pixels you buy will be displayed on the homepage permanently. The homepage will not change. Using some of the money I make from the site, I guarantee to keep it online for at least 5 years, but hopefully much longer. I want it to become a kind of internet time capsule. So, in the long run, I believe the pixels will offer good value. You will have a piece of internet history!
Isn’t it lovely? Kind of like the Vegas Strip of the web?
October 28th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
That’s awesome! Looks like he’s already a good chunk of the way there, too! Man, wish I’d have thought of that. Oh, and I also wish the web was around when I was starting to rack up my student loans
October 28th, 2005 at 2:48 pm
I suppose I should have come up with the “Million Dollar Gopher Hole”
December 21st, 2005 at 1:09 pm
My hat goes off to Alex Tew, he certainly found a unique idea to sell ad space. I actually took his idea one step further… selling ad space by the BYTE! There are so many “pixel pushers” out there now that I needed to put a spin on the pixel advertising concept. Check out http://www.buckabyte.com
December 21st, 2005 at 2:45 pm
I think I will start a “buck an electron” site
Don’t spend all the millions in one place.