WSJ on Million Dollar Homepage
From: http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB113261806930503580-lMyQjAxMDE1MzIyMjYyMTI4Wj.html
How Selling Pixels May Yield a Million Bucks
November 22, 2005; Page B1
It was just a few months ago that 21-year-old Alex Tew of Great Britain was stumped about how to pay for college. He'd filled a notebook with ideas before jotting down this simple, if rather audacious, query to himself: How Can I Become a Millionaire?
In the annals of entrepreneurship, what followed is an instructional tale of how a brainstorm, coupled with the Internet's powerful word-of-mouth culture, can set a trend in motion with lightning speed. Mr. Tew says his strategy was to find an idea simple to understand and cheap to set up, with a catchy name that would garner attention online, where he gained experience from having free-lanced as a Web designer for a few years.
Ultimately, his solution amounted to making money via Internet advertising -- but with a twist. Instead of selling banner ads, text links or splashy videolike ads that fill a screen, Mr. Tew opted to hawk the simplest graphical denominator of a computer screen: the pixel. A pixel is a tiny dot of light and color, and each screen has tens of thousands of them.
[Alex Tew sells tiny ad spaces on his Web page (inset) and has generated $623,800 toward his $1 million goal.]
Alex Tew sells tiny ad spaces on his Web page (inset) and has generated $623,800 toward his $1 million goal.
Mr. Tew created a home page, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, where he divided the screen into 10,000 small squares of 100 pixels each. His plan: to sell the pixels for $1 a piece, with a minimum order of 100 pixels. In each space, buyers could put a graphical ad of their choosing that links to their own site when clicked on. The end result is a cluttered collage of ads in various shapes and colors all amassed on a single digital billboard. (Mr. Tew doesn't charge his advertisers anything when a visitor clicks on the ads.)
Mr. Tew pledged to keep the site up for at least five years and to close the page when his goal of one million dollars was reached. "I had to think big," he says.
The notion seemed absurd. Who would want to advertise on an unknown site that had no target audience, no track record of attracting visitors or even the slightest brand recognition?
But as with many gimmicks, its newness gave it legs, as did Mr. Tew's shrewd marketing. He first roped his friends and family into buying pixels and placing ads to make the page seem legitimate. He then began touting his site, and himself, to bloggers, who wrote about his crazy idea and linked to the site, which directed traffic his way. The media in Britain picked up on his efforts, fueling more visitors.
Within two weeks of the site's Aug. 26 launch Mr. Tew says he sold $40,000 in ads. More important, the traffic numbers started gaining attention among the U.S. Internet community.
Since its launch, the site has received a total of about 1.5 million unique visitors. In mid-September, it landed on the "Movers & Shakers" feature of Alexa.com, which ranks the world's Web sites by the number of people who visit them. Marketing executives often troll Alexa.com, which is owned by Amazon.com, to check out what's hot and what's not, and at one point Mr. Tew's site reached Alexa's No. 2 spot.
Currently, the site gets 600,000 to 700,000 unique visitors a month. As of yesterday evening, Mr. Tew said he was $623,800 toward his goal, more than enough to pay for college and earmark some cash for his next entrepreneurial venture, he says. (He keeps a running tally of his sales on the Web site, and though the figure can't be independently verified, screenshots emailed by Mr. Tew of his PayPal and other checkout accounts appear to support his claim.)
While there's also no way of knowing for sure whether Mr. Tew is the first entrepreneur to sell pixels, the idea was new enough that it felt that way to onlookers.
"I was like, 'What's this?' " says Daniel Khesin, vice president of marketing at DS Laboratories Inc., a skin-care company in Lake Success, N.Y. After examining Mr. Tew's site, he says: "There was nothing inherently special about the page, but it was very obvious to us that at the very least, buying some pixels would be a good idea for the sheer number of visitors he was getting."
DS Laboratories purchased 800 pixels. Almost overnight, he says, traffic surged at the company's Web site by twentyfold, and all of the increase came from milliondollarhomepage.com. More impressive, he says, sales by Internet companies that DS Laboratories' site links to jumped almost 50% within a week of the ad going up.
"Our skepticism was that this is untargeted traffic," Mr. Khesin says. "But this advertising has definitely paid for itself many times forward. And unlike banner advertising where it goes away, people will always know where to find it to go back and purchase more products."
Similarly, Chris Magras, president Evisions Marketing Inc. in Tempe, Ariz., which helps Web sites get higher rankings on search services, also noted milliondollarhomepage.com's movement on Alexa.com. "Some people would say it's a bad idea, some would say it's a good one. All I know is that it was generating interest," Mr. Magras says.
Evisions bought 6,400 pixels and its ad went up on a Friday. The following Monday morning, Evisions was getting 2,000 more unique visitors to its home page, all linked directly from milliondollarhomepage.com. The number of leads, or visitors filling out personal information on the Evisions site, jumped to 300 a day from 100.
"It was quality traffic," Mr. Magras says. "It was definitely the biggest payoff for a one-stop ad buy we've ever had." He adds that the company is still getting 800 to 1,000 new visitors daily from Mr. Tew's site.
Copycats popped up almost immediately; now there are hundreds of Web sites selling pixels, some of them directly crediting Mr. Tew -- and even linking to his site. Some advertisers have put out press releases touting their alliances with Mr. Tew's site, further helping spike his traffic.
The risk, of course, is that as the original pixel concept gets mimicked, it will suffer from brand dilution and become a less compelling a business model. What's more, as milliondollarhomepage.com has filled up, it's become harder for advertisers to stand out amid a busy screen with messages ranging from "CasinoScams" and "Free Ringtones" to "Jesus" and "Hypnosis"; the smallest ad spaces, at 100-pixels square, are nearly indecipherable at this point.
Whether Mr. Tew reaches a million dollars remains to be seen. He readily notes that he'd never do another site like the original. Now, he says, "the copycats are all competing with each other."
One is Moneypants.com, a personal finance Web site geared toward women that says it has 600 members and has collected $4,500 over the last few weeks from its own pixel "Dream Page" -- a decent chunk of change for a nascent enterprise.
"It's very compelling," says MoneyPants Chief Executive Komal Bhojwani. "We don't have to end up going the investor route, which might require us to make changes to the business that we don't want to make. And we didn't have to get into debt by borrowing from a bank. We are generating revenue and not expenses."
One advertiser, Cherryl Weaver, says she's seen a 13% jump in traffic to her real estate Web site, www.hotlaneighborhoods.com, from the 1,500 MoneyPants.com pixels she bought. "As long as it's a strategic alliance, it makes sense," Ms. Weaver says, alluding to the affinity between a personal-finance site and real estate. "Would I team up with McDonald's if they did a dream page? No."
Meantime, James Thomson, a Web designer in Branson, Mo., says he's wiped out $30,000 in personal debt accumulated after the dot-come bust with his site, www.millionpennyhomepage.com, by selling pixels by the penny, instead of the dollar. Yesterday, he had only $974 left to go before reaching his goal of $10,000.
And Christian Abad, president of Accessible Computing Inc. in Charlotte, N.C., is trying to lure new clients to his pixel page, called www.pixelads4all.com, by giving them a 50% discount off their pixel purchases. Sales have been slow, but he remains optimistic about the overall concept and has even purchased 11 domain names in anticipation of a future in pixel advertising. Among them: pixelads4shopping.com and pixelads4porn.com.
For his part, Mr. Tew says he wants to keep milliondollarhomepage.com online "forever." If and when a million pixels are sold, he says he'll leave the page frozen in time, no changes allowed, no new buyers permitted. His ultimate goal is as lofty as the original concept: He hopes his site will be like a time capsule showing "what's possible on the Internet" -- an iconic image that he imagines "one day might be a piece of art in a museum."
Write to Gwendolyn Bounds at wendy.bounds@wsj.com
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October 31, 2005
A Successful Spin-Off on MillionDollarHomePage.com?
Rent Pixel Ads
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PBWiki - Creating Wikis is As Easy As Making a PB&J Sandwich
Today, I had a great conversation with the co-founder of PBWiki. He is a recent graduate of Stanford and a few months ago, he and friend created a site where consumers could easily create a wiki. After softly promoting it, he got 1,000 registrations in the first 2 days and now has over 15,000 and is the leading consumer wiki web site.
I think there are many things that led to the success of the site. However, from an outside perspective, I think he created a perfect metaphor. Many people have heard about wikis, especially via the wikipedia, but they didn't know where to get started (myself included). The idea of having a wiki for a free in a matter of a few minutes is just very appealing.
Overall, I think there is a big shift to simplicity. In fact, I just read the Fast Company cover story on this topic. "For Dummies" has done very well in the book publishing industry. In fact, becoming the first or second most successful book franchise ever. In a way, Google is the "For Dummies" for software.
It seems like there are many opportunities for "momentary enterprises" based on simplicity. I think a particular hole to fill would be making "getting started" easier. I think a lot of people don't start stuff because it's fuzzy in their mind. However, when it's broken down into its smallest components, it can become very easy. One specific thing I've heard mentioned by many people recently is the complexity of starting up a business. Many people are extremely interested in this, but never do it.
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October 14, 2005
The Business Experiment Status
Check out this blast email I got from thebusinessexperiment.com. It is fascinating and has a lot of ideas that we could learn from:
Hi Everyone,
There seems to be a problem at TBE. We put something up for a vote, and we get emails and forum posts about how we aren't ready to vote on that issue yet. Nothing is getting done. The business plan has been "open" for weeks and it is going nowhere. This wisdom of crowds process for creating a business simply does not work. There is no accountability. We are experiencing the classic free rider problem where each individual lets everyone else do the work, and hopes that the crowd does good work and they get their cut of the next big thing. As a result, nothing gets done. Yet the moment I talk about moving away from giving out equity to everybody, I get a bunch of complaints about how then there will be no incentive to participate. Let's face it. Participate in what? As of now there is no business.
Think about this for a second. In this era of WEB2.0 hype, we have the only company attempting to bring users together to create a real business or businesses. We have a talented and creative user base that is interested in these ideas. And we are getting ready to get a lot of attention as a major business periodical will publish a story about us late next month. Don't give up just yet.
The major change at TBE is this - we are going to create an "upcoming vote" blog and "upcoming vote" forum. The blog will list polls opening in the next few days. The forum is where you can discuss options that should be in the polls. When the polling day comes, the poll is posted. If you didn't get a chance to contribute your opinion, it's too late. Options will be pulled out the forums and posted so that you can vote. If no options are posted, Sean, or the teams, can make the decision without input from the crowd. We can't wait on every one of you to give us your opinion because this has to get done someday.
Finally, the equity issue is becoming a very big problem for us. Seriously, there may be no way around it without spending a whole bunch of money. Even if we give options or warrants or promises or anything like that, if there is a chance you end up with equity, the SEC requires us to go through an expensive disclosure process. However, if groups stay small, that is irrelevant. If you want to use TBE to find 5 people to start a company with and split the equity in that yourself, it is fine because that is a small number of people. So, next week there will be a vote on how TBE will solve this problem. If you have a proposed solution, post it in the forum and we will put it up for a vote.
There is one new open poll, about whether TBE should pursue other businesses right now or just focus on WOU. Many users seem not to like WOU, so perhaps those of you that don't would rather work on something else.
This has been an experiment, and round #1 has failed. Help us define the next direction for the site. Somewhere in all of this, there is a new way of doing business. Yes I know, you don't want to share it with the crowd because you want compensation for your idea. Didn't we cover the value of ideas already? Log in. Make TBE what you want it to be, but let's make it something other than a freerider's utopia.
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October 13, 2005
Purposeful Giving
On Seth Godin's blog, he points to a school that was built in Nepal as a result of ebook sales he donated.
I think that this is a very smart move. It seems like everybody is jumping on the cause-related marketing band wagon. This means that it's less unique to say, "A % of sales are donated to charity."
With that said, do you think the desperate for money idea has a relation to this. Corporations could donate to the best stories and get a better return on their donations.
In my experience in the nonprofit world, many sell themselves with stories of top alumni, not statistical analysis on the impact they've made.
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October 09, 2005
Million Dollar Home Page
Million Dollar Home Page is the perfect example of a one day idea. It was created by a graduating high school senior and only involves basic HTML knowledge. It was setup in a few days with the only costs being web hosting and domain registration. Two months later, it gets over 100K visitors a day and has made its founder over $300,000.
If you had thought of this idea, would you have pursued it? While this idea is one of the rare ideas that manage to breakout, I think it is possible over-time to refine one's thinking to the point that the probability of having a breakout idea is high. Furthermore, I think we live in a unique era where the time and money involved to create one of these ideas is extremely small.
It is commonly accepted that 10% of an company's success is inspiration and the other 90% is perspiration. One day ideas turn this upside down.
