I’m sure you’ve all heard about the Million Dollar Homepage by now. (The site where the owner sells pixels in 10 X 10 spots for $100 ($1 per pixel) on his site). Since August 25th he’s sold 664,000 (and rising every day - which means he’s made $664,000 so far!). The race is on now to see who will be the one to buy the last spaces left (as that buyer will get some publicity for that).

How did 21 year old Alex Tew get the idea?  In his own words he says:

It was a muggy summer’s night late in August, the time around midnight, and there I was, lying on my bed with a notepad, brainstorming ideas to make money for uni. I think I’m quite a creative person, so I wanted to come up with an idea that was unique and would hopefully capture people’s imagination, but with the whole purpose of making money. No point being shy about it! I think we brits can sometimes be too shy about money. Well bugger that, I DO NOT want to be a broke student!

So anyway, after an hour of two of jotting random things on paper, the idea seemingly popped out of nowhere. Almost like my subconscious mind had been ticking over in the background, working it all out. So it just kind of happened. That’s about it. I scribbled it down and within about 10 minutes a picture of what needed to be done had emerged.

I found reading his blog really interesting. On September 7th he reports "No pixels (sold), but media interest" to just over a week later on Sept 18th reporting that:

I launched this site 3 weeks ago thinking it was a fairly interesting idea that might well make a bit of cash if I could generate some interest. Well thanks to the awesome power of word-of-mouth, I’ve now sold enough pixels to cover the entire cost of my forthcoming 3 years at University! Which, if you want the figures, is approx. £20,000 GBP ($37,000 USD). Infact, I’ve made quite a bit more than that already.

So today I figured I’d better get in and get a spot before it’s sold out. Somewhere on there is my mug in a 10X10 pixed spot with the alt text of "Jim Boykin was here 2005".

So why did I buy it you ask? Was it the traffic I’d get on my 10X10 mug shot? Was it for the link value…hum, over 20k backlinks showing in Yahoo….naw, was it the fact this this is internet history and I’d like to be in on it, that’s all. (ok, maybe if the link is valued that’d be nice too…I’ll admit it :)

Have you ever had a million dollar idea?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, People - Non SEO, Link Building, Jim's Crazy Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.