The Million Dollar Homepage is a website created by Alex Tew in 2005.
When Tew was a student and was about to begin a three-year Business Management course at the University of Nottingham, he was concerned that he would be left with a student loan that could take years to repay. To raise money, he decided to sell a million pixels on a website.
The home page consisted of one million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid. Brands that want to purchase a spot, can add their own image, logo or advertisement, with an option to include a link to their site, after paying a $1 fee for one "pixel".
But since individual pixels are way too small to be seen easily, the "pixels" were actually sold in 100-pixel "blocks" measuring 10 × 10 pixels; the minimum price for purchase was $100.
The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating one million dollars of income for Tew.
Tew promised that the site would remain online for at least five years when he first created it. But due to the increased popularity, the site quickly became an internet phenomenon.
The site was initially marketed only through word of mouth. But after the site made its first $1,000, it received media attention, bringing even more visitors to the site. As a result, by the end of the month, The Million Dollar Homepage had received $250,000 and was ranked Number 3 on Alexa Internet's list of "Movers and Shakers" behind the websites for Britney Spears and Photo District News.
Two months after being released, The Million Dollar Homepage had sold more than 500,900 pixels to 1,400 customers. And by New Year's Eve, the site received 25,000 unique visitors every hour and had an Alexa Rank of 127.
At that time, 999,000 of the 1,000,000 pixels had been sold.
On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay.
According to Tew, this was "the most fair and logical thing" to do. It was better to auction them rather than losing "the integrity and degree of exclusivity intrinsic to the million-pixel concept" by launching a second Million Dollar Homepage.
The auction closed on 11 January with MillionDollarWeightLoss.com coming out as the winner. The online store selling diet-related products paid $38,100, bringing the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross.
Due to its popularity, the site experienced a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) as well as ransom demand. The site was left inaccessible to visitors for about a week before its security was upgraded.
According to Tew back in February 2006:
"From the outset I knew the idea had potential, but it was one of those things that could have gone either way. 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). I knew that the idea was quirky enough to create interest ... The Internet is a very powerful medium."
While the intention for the site was to help Tew's studies at the university, he apparently dropped out of his business degree after only one term attending. Tew decided that he wanted to become an entrepreneur instead.
As of 2017, it was considered that a third of all outgoing links on the site were either dead or redirected to different domains.
Tew and his Million Dollar Homepage convinced others to do the same, as many similar sites popped up almost immediately in an attempt to get rich quickly. But still, these copycats have very little ads.