The One Dollar Weblog Page

By now you’ve probably heard about The Million Dollar Homepage. Is it just another annoying get-rich-quick/begging scheme, or a laudable experiment in selling ad space and anticipated PageRank (hence the ads promoting dating, printer cartridges, gambling and insurance)?

What’s most interesting to me is that the site publishes click-through stats for those advertisers daft enough to not choose a direct link. Eventually it should be possible to do a useful analysis of the data, looking at the best positions, styles of ad, etc., as well as the overall pattern of traffic over time (particularly if someone bothers to take a snapshot of that page every day; any volunteers?).

Anyway, I’ve decided that a dollar is far too expensive, and all those pixels would clutter up my site far too much, so the 100 pixels below are available for a mere cent each. As for a story behind it, well I can’t claim to be a student facing huge debt, so how about if I say the $1 revenue would almost cover the cost of the 2 pairs of Tesco Value socks I bought yesterday? Advertisers flocking to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity should form an orderly queue over at the contact page.

Sun 11th Sep 2005, 1:14pm GMT

Filed under: Daftness, E-commerce, Marketing and Advertising, Search Engines, Web, Weblogs

Comments

Cannot do much with those pixels! :)
Your competition is stiffening. In addition to the U.K. site you blog about, there are more out there:
U.S. - http://www.milliondollarwebpage.com
Europe -http://www.millioneurohomepage.com
I think there is even a million penny home page too.

— Goodard Stubing, 12th Sep, 8:58pm

Yep, it's at http://www.millionpennyhomepage.co…
Ah well, I guess I'll just have to bear the full cost of those socks myself.

— Matt Round, 12th Sep, 10:22pm

At least Alex Tew has done the sensible thing and got some good press, which will give him a massive boost.
The Million Penny one looks like an exact rip-off of the design, which is a shame, you'd have thought he could do something a little different. Also all the links seem to go through a redirect script, which won't attract any SEO people.
It's a good idea for a fad, so I hope Alex gets some dosh to help him out at university. Or at least his sock collection.

— Paul, 13th Sep, 12:02pm

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$1.00 15 x 15 Circle U Can Add Animated Or Static Images

— like5, 29th Sep, 5:31am

Y'know, I'd normally delete such blatant self-promotion, but I'm going to let that one stay to highlight the difference between the original and the rip-offs.
The original isn't succeeding just because it's flogging space on a page and is the first of its kind to get attention. There's a real person and a story behind the site, which allowed him to get positive offline coverage, and he's taken the trouble to communicate with visitors (via the blog, case study, etc.). He just about managed to get enough attention and good will to kick-start the whole thing and build momentum; rip-offs will struggle to do the same.

— Matt Round, 29th Sep, 5:55am

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