I knew that the idea was quirky enough to create interest . My thinking was I had nothing to lose (apart from the 50 Euros or so it cost to register the domain and setup the hosting). The Million Dollar Homepage was still receiving thousands of daily viewers in 2019, although by 2017, many of the website's links suffered from link rot, which has caused the URLs to no longer function as originally intended.įrom the outset I knew the idea had potential, but it was one of those things that could have gone either way. Tew dropped out of the business degree the site was set up to fund after one term. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Wiltshire Constabulary investigated the attack and extortion attempt. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross.ĭuring 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. On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The Alexa ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127 as of 9 May 2009, it was 40,044. Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon, with copycat websites emerging in response. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels. 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 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 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 Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education.

Promote my website to millions