The original idea was very good and inspired many clones idea. Then the creator got lots of praise and hype. I remember reading articles about investors offering him lots of money. Not to punish his original creative spark, but the story of milliondollarhomepage always reminds me of this english phrase: once you are lucky, twice you are good.
That's why that if you receive all that news hype and publicity one day, you have to remember that your own bed will always be the best place to sleep at night. Gotta keep grounded.
It'd be interesting to see where the advertisers ended up in all of this. I'd imagine they got some SEO out of it but it doesn't strike me that "tabmarks" has gone very far since the million dollar homepage launched. I wonder what the average ROI was, and if the million dollar homepage served as an effective launchpad for anyone or anything.
I used to work for one of the companies who bought in early (they're top left somewhere :). Not sure it brought us much, if anything, though it did get the company logo on TV a few times when it was picked up by the news.
We bought a 20x20 spot (JobDig, if you can find it on the page you have too much free time). All we got out of it was a bunch of spam from all the 50k homepages and things like that...
The reward from it was we bought the person who made the $400 purchase a t-shirt with the page printed on it, in honor of the "great" idea:)
Yeah I sure do. I bought the square with the "R" for reserved just beneath the grey "Download Movies" button near the middle top.
The guy rejected my icon the first time around, I think I accidentally made it 11x10 or something instead of 10x10. So I resent it within 24 hours but he didn't get or ignored that email and the few subsequent ones after that. :(
I loved the idea and the guy running it seemed like a great guy, but it left a sour taste in my mouth when I didn't even get the graphic I wanted.
Luckily I was really just seeing what would happen and hoping in vain I would magically profit from the trickle of click-throughs one day.
He was sonewhat notorious on the London geek social scene for being an arogant jerk.
I met him a few times. It seemed like he "suceeded" too early with no real idea of how to do business.
He seemed like an ok kid that found himself with a lot of money overnight. We've all seen the "what now" threads on HN imagine how that could affect a teenager without the right people to help guide them.
The same guy had a startup fail spectacularly afterwards, with investor money ('low six figures') down the drain. It was a cheezeburger-style funny video/picture aggregator called PopJam.
It's kind of galling how such moronic things can make large amounts of money for one individual, whereas other folks (scientists, mathematicians, engineers) who are really striving to make a fundamental contribution to society barely make ends meet.
The million dollars were revenue; not sure about the guy's net profits when everything was said and done. If I understand correctly, there was some kind of SLA in place -- the people who bought all those pixels expected them to be on line for a certain period of time, etc.
Ah.. one of the lightning never strikes twice type of ideas that worked well for one guy but all the followers and imitators were left in the frigid cold wasteland.
I knew a lot of people that would just sit there and dartboard the site for a half hour each day. I just went a few times and looked at how it was filling up and trying to figure out if there was anything else to do like that myself.
Yep - I've got a 10x10 pixel slice of history on there. The link it points to is down now - my first attempt at earning money via the internet. First 3 or 4 months it generated a 800 - 1000 CTR. After that, headed south quite quickly.. No reason to visit after the news/PR died-down.
Wasn't exactly overnight (5 months)... And it ended up being more than a million because he reserved some pixels and then auctioned them off on ebay. $1,037,100, according to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Dollar_Homepage).
buy a book from Paul Carr - Confessions of the media whore - there is quite a bit written on Alex Tew there - quite an entertaining book I would say :)
I remember hearing about this a long time ago. Even then I thought it was a dumb idea. How many people would repeatedly visit this site to see the adverts, other than the advertisers themselves?
Did the fellow ever end up making a million dollars?
He ended up selling them all yeah. Minus tax and whatnot, he still pocketed a tidy sum and decided to forego university (which it was originally to pay for) and become a business god.
I suppose this is evidence that hype works, at least over short time scales, although in this case I guess that his reputation must have subsequently suffered.
Yes. I remember. I have created a first clone of this in my country (Czech republic) and raised few grand for charity. It was my first business (if you can call this business) and a great learning experience. Unfortunately I let the domain expire by mistake - it would be great to have it still running just for a piece of internet history :)
