A Dumb Idea Worth One Million
Published on January 13, 2019
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
Please raise a hand if you knew about The Million Dollar Homepage. I'm inviting you to revisit Internet history for a reason. Why? Hint: there is no such thing as a dumb idea.
From Wikipedia:
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 consisted 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 of 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.[2][3]
Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon. The Alexa ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127; as of 9 May 2009, it was 40,044.[4] 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.
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I've been obsessed with this phenomenon since I read about it in 2006.
How many people, including myself, tried to replicate this success by creating a similar model?
I've followed some of the 1700+ websites that came into existence during 2006-2007. Most of them made not even enough to justify renewal of the domain name.
I want to open a discussion on the topic Original Idea vs. Proven Model.
Who's in?
Have a nice and productive day! (oh, wait... is it Sunday already?)
Richard
Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible. —Chapter 1, Down the Rabbit-Hole
PS: The rabbit hole goes deeper than you might expect, but only a few of you will dare (or care) to ask how deep!
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