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Die Eine-Million-Dollar-Homepage

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The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived by Alex Tew, a then 21-year-old student from Wiltshire, England to help raise money for his university education. Launched on 26 August 2005, the website is said to have generated a gross income of $1,037,100. The site's Alexa ranking as of 4 February 2009 is 46,523, having peaked at around 127.

Die Eine-Million-Dollar-Homepage
http://milliondollarhomepage.com/

The home page of the site consists of one million pixels in a 1000×1000 pixel grid, on which image-based links were sold for $1 per pixel, in minimum 10×10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to which they were linked, and a slogan displayed when hovering the cursor over the link. The aim of the site was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating one million dollars of income for the creator.

On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels left were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100.00, bringing the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross income.

Development

The Million Dollar Homepage was conceived in August 2005 by Alex Tew, a twenty-one-year-old student from Cricklade, Wiltshire, England.[1] About to begin a three year Business Management degree course at the University of Nottingham, he did not want to become burdened with a student loan, which, after his brother graduated owing £30,000, he was aware would take many years to repay.[1] After rejecting a number of ideas, Tew thought he might be able to sell pixels on a website, where the purchaser would be able to add their own image, logo or advertisement, with the option of including a link to the customer's website. He decided to call the project The Million Dollar Website, and sell a million pixels for $1 each. Tew chose to sell the pixels in dollars because he felt they were the universal currency on the internet, and because the pound was strong against the dollar – £1 was worth approximately $1.80.[2][3]

Vorlage:Quote box The following day, he still liked the idea and began to work on the website.[4] He spent £50 on the domain name and a basic web-hosting package.[5] Tew realised that if he sold individual pixels, the images would be too small to be easily seen, so he made them available as 100-pixel "blocks" measuring 10×10 pixels, meaning the minimum purchase price was $100.[2] The website, hosted by Sitelutions, went live on 26 August 2005 and the homepage featured a Web banner with the site's name and a pixel counter displaying the number of pixels sold, a navigation bar containing nine small Hypertext 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.[2][6] Tew made a promise to his customers to keep the site online for five years; it will shutdown no earlier than 26 August 2010.[7]

As the the last 1,000 pixels were being auctioned, Tew decided to defer his university studies until September 2006.

Vorlage:Quote

Sales

Three days after the site began operation, Tew made his first sale. An online music website bought 400-pixels in a 20×20 block.[8] After seven days he had sold 900 pixels, and another 4700 pixels a week later.[8] Tew initially planned not to market the site, instead allowing it to become known by word of mouth; however, he used his first $1,000 to pay for a press release that was picked up by the BBC.[4] The technology news website The Register ran two stories on Tew and The Million Dollar Homepage,[9][10] and the site received 1465 Diggs, becoming one of the most Digged links in that week.[11] The publicity help sparked more interest in the site; by the end of September Alexa Internet ranked it Number 3 on its list of "Movers and Shakers" behind the websites for Britney Spears and Photo District News,[12] and Tew had earned $250,000. 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, Cheapflights.com, Schiffer Publishing, Rhapsody, Tenacious D, GoldenPalace.com and other online casinos, and companies offering get-rich-quick schemes, online dating services, personal loans, free samples, website designs and holidays.[13]

In October, the site received more press attention. Tew appeared on the BBC and Sky News's breakfast television programmes, and featured in a number of national newspapers, and The Times purchased a 14×2 block for $2,800.[13] The extra publicity brought even more visitors to the website. On 6 October, Tew reported the site received 65,000 unique visitors, and 100,000 unique visitors eleven days later. On 26 October, exactly two months since the Million Dollar Homepage launched, Tew had sold over half the available pixels. 500,900 pixels had been sold to 1,400 customers.[8] By New Year's Eve, Tew reported that the site was being visited by 25,000 unique visitors every hour, and that 999,000 of the 1,000,000 pixels had been sold.

On 1 January 2006, Tew announced that because there was so much demand for the last 1,000 pixels, "the most fair and logical thing" to do was auction them on eBay, rather than losing "the integrity and degree of exclusivity intrinsic to the million-pixel concept" by launching a second Million Dollar Homepage.[8] The auction lasted ten days and received 99 legitimate bids. Bids went as high as $160,109.99, but were either retracted by the bidders or canceled for being fake.[14] "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.[15] The winning bid was for $38,100,[16] placed by MillionDollarWeightLoss.com, an online store selling a diet-related products. "I thought it might go for a higher amount because of all the attention," Tew commented, "but it's still a good result."[15] The Million Dollar Homepage made a gross total of $1,037,100 in five months.[14][17] After costs, taxes, and a donation to The Prince's Trust, a charity for young people, Tew's expected nNet income was $650,000 – $700,000.[18]

Media attention

Following the September press release that first brought attention to the site, The Million Dollar Homepage was featured in articles on BBC Online,[1] The Register,[9] The Daily Telegraph,[19] and PC Pro.[20] Tew also appeared on the national breakfast television programmes Sky News Sunrise and BBC Breakfast to discuss his venture.[21][22]

Vorlage:Quote box

By November the website was becoming popular around the world, receiving attention from Financial Times Deutschland in Germany,[23] TVNZ in New Zealand,[24] Terra Networks in Latin America,[25] the China Daily,[26] and especially in the United States where it was covered in Adweek,[27] Florida Today,[28] and Wall Street Journal.[29] Tew hired a US-based publicist to help with the attention from the American media and made a week-long trip to the US, where he was interviewed on ABC News Radio,[30] the Fox News Channel,[31] Attack of the Show!,[32] and local news programmes.[33][34]

The concept was described as "simple and brilliant",[28] "clever",[35] "ingenious",[4] and "a unique platform [for advertising] which is also a bit of fun".[19] 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."[4] Popular Mechanics 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".[36]

As the final pixels were being sold, interest built up yet again. Tew was interviewed on Richard & Judy,[37] and profiled in the online BBC News Magazine.[5] 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".[18]

Similar sites

As The Million Dollar Homepage became increasingly popular, its concept spawned many copycat sites. Vorlage:Fact which were greatly encouraged by the sales of a pixel script and by the fact the Million Dollar Homepage was quickly selling out of its last pixels and generating further publicity. Most of these sites failed.Vorlage:Fact

In December 2006 Alex Tew started a new project Pixelotto. It finished in January 2008 and was less successful than Million Dollar Homepage, with almost 85% of the pixels remaining unsold at the end of its one-year run. There are no plans to run the project for another year.

DDoS attack

BBC News has reported that the site was subject to a distributed Denial-of-service attack, commencing on January 11, 2006.[38] It is claimed that the attackers sent blackmail emails to Tew, demanding payment of a ransom to prevent the site being attacked.

This was resolved with a hardware fix. Mr Tew said in a newsletter: Vorlage:Cquote2 It was not reported how much was spent enlisting the extra services to protect the site.

References

Vorlage:Reflist

de:Alex Tew

  1. ↑ a b c Student's cash-raising net scheme, BBC News, 22 September 2005. Abgerufen im 30 January 2009 
  2. ↑ a b c Alex Tew: The Million Dollar Homepage FAQ. Million Dollar Homepage, abgerufen am 30. Januar 2009.
  3. ↑ Current and Historical Rate Tables. XE.com, abgerufen am 30. Januar 2009.
  4. ↑ a b c d Steve Boggan: Million dollar boy In: The Times, 14 October 2005. Abgerufen im 30 January 2009 
  5. ↑ a b Tom Geoghegan: The million-dollar student, BBC News, 6 January 2006. Abgerufen im 4 February 2009 
  6. ↑ Alex Tew: The Million Dollar Homepage. The Million Dollar Homepage, 15. September 2005, archiviert vom Original am 15. September 2005; abgerufen am 30. Januar 2009.
  7. ↑ Alex Tew: Buy Pixels – Terms and Conditions. The Million Dollar Homepage, 26. August 2005, abgerufen am 30. Januar 2009.
  8. ↑ a b c d Alex Tew: Blog Archive. The Million Dollar Homepage, abgerufen am 30. Januar 2009.
  9. ↑ a b Tim Richardson: Student flogs pixels to fund education, The Register, 8 September 2009. Abgerufen im 30 January 2009 
  10. ↑ Tim Richardson: Million pixel student makes £32k, The Register, 20 September 2009. Abgerufen im 30 January 2009 
  11. ↑ The Million Dollar Home Page. Digg, 12. Oktober 2009, abgerufen am 30. Januar 2009.
  12. ↑ Movers & Shakers. Alexa Internet, archiviert vom Original am 26. September 2005; abgerufen am 30. Januar 2009.
  13. ↑ a b Alex Tew: Pixel List. The Million Dollar Homepage, abgerufen am 30. Januar 2009.
  14. ↑ a b Alex Tew: Blog. The Million Dollar Homepage, abgerufen am 1. Februar 2009.
  15. ↑ a b Gwendolyn Bounds: Pixel-Ad Entrepreneur Expected to Reach Goal (Memento des Originals vom 13 January 2006 im Internet Archive) In: Wall Street Journal, 11 January 2006. Abgerufen im 4 February 2009 
  16. ↑ Alex Tew: Own The Last 1,000 Pixels on MillionDollarHomepage.com. eBay, Januar 2006, archiviert vom Original am 27. Januar 2009; abgerufen am 1. Februar 2009.
  17. ↑ Tim Richardson: Pixel-flogging student makes a million, The Register, 12 January 2006. Abgerufen im 1 February 2009 
  18. ↑ a b Gewndolyn Bounds: Pixel-Ad Entrepreneur Closes With an Auction In: Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2006, S. B8. Abgerufen im 4 February 2009 
  19. ↑ a b Richard Savill: Student solves debt fear as website earns £56,000 in a month In: The Telegraph, 24 September 2005. Abgerufen im 1 February 2009 
  20. ↑ Simon Aughton: UK student makes pixels pay In: PC Pro, 22 September 2005. Abgerufen im 1 February 2009 
  21. ↑ Sky News Sunrise. Presenter: Eamonn Holmes. Sky News. 6 October 2005.
  22. ↑ BBC Breakfast. Presenters: Dermot Murnaghan, Natasha Kaplinsky. BBC One. 20 October 2005.
  23. ↑ Nicolai Kwasniewski: Der Weg zur ersten Million - Ein Pixel, ein Dollar In: Financial Times Deutschland, 29 September 2009. Abgerufen im 4 February 2009 (german). 
  24. ↑ Web review: Topical site of the week. Television New Zealand, 21. Oktober 2005, abgerufen am 4. Februar 2009.
  25. ↑ Estudante quer juntar US$ 1 milhão vendendo pixels. Terra Networks, 26. September 2005; (spanisch).
  26. ↑ Cash pours in for student with $1m Web idea In: China Daily, 31 December 2005. Abgerufen im 4 February 2009 
  27. ↑ Tim Nudd: The King Of The Pixels In: Adweek, 10 October 2005. Abgerufen im 4 February 2009 
  28. ↑ a b Chris Kridler: Student cashes in on brilliant, simple idea (Memento des Originals vom 10 December 2005 im Internet Archive) In: Florida Today, 4 October 2005. Abgerufen im 4 February 2009 
  29. ↑ Gwendolyn Bounds: How Selling Pixels May Yield a Million Bucks In: Wall Street Journal, 22 November 2005, S. B1. Abgerufen im 4 February 2009 
  30. ↑ News interview. Interviewer: Jim Hickey. ABC News Radio. 14 November 2005.
  31. ↑ Your World with Neil Cavuto. Presenter: Neil Cavuto. Fox News Channel. 14 November 2005.
  32. ↑ Attack of the Show!. Presenter: Kevin Pereira. Fox News Channel. 15 November 2005.
  33. ↑ NBC 11 News. Interviewer: Cary Berglund. NBC. KNBC, Los Angeles, California. 16 November 2005.
  34. ↑ Channel 4 News. Interviewer: Scott Budman. NBC. KNTV, San Jose, California. 22 November 2005.
  35. ↑ Jennifer Guevin: A million-dollar home page, CNET News, 13 September 2005. Abgerufen im 1 February 2009 
  36. ↑ James Ross: Million-Dollar Brainstorm In: Popular Mechanics, 30 September 2005. Abgerufen im 1 February 2009 
  37. ↑ Richard & Judy. Presenters: Richard Madeley, Judy Finnigan. Channel 4. 9 January 2006.
  38. ↑ Blackmailers target $1m website. In: Technology News. BBC News, 18. Januar 2006, abgerufen am 24. Mai 2007.
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