The Million Dollar Homepage

The Million Dollar Homepage
The Million Dollar Homepage (as of January 2021)
Type of site
Pixel advertising
OwnerAlex Tew
Revenue$1,037,100
URLMillionDollarHomepage.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationNone
Launched26 August 2005; 19 years ago (2005-08-26)
Current statusPartly active

The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels.[1][2]

Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon, with copycat websites emerging in response. The Alexa ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127; As of 9 May 2009, it was 40,044.[3] On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross.

During the January 2006 auction, the website was subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) and ransom demand, which left it inaccessible to visitors for a week while its security system was upgraded. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Wiltshire Constabulary investigated the attack and extortion attempt.[4][5]

After a short time, Tew decided to drop out of the business degree program for which he had created the site in the first place. As of 2019, The Million Dollar Homepage was still receiving thousands of daily viewers; however, by 2017, many of the website's links suffered from link rot, causing the URLs to no longer function as originally intended.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference WSJ was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference WSJ2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ "milliondollarhomepage.com Site Information". Alexa Internet. Archived from the original on 3 June 2009. Retrieved 9 May 2009.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference BBC DDoS was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ "Million dollar pixel site targeted by hackers". NBC News. Associated Press. 18 January 2006. Archived from the original on 18 March 2014. Retrieved 5 February 2009.