Saturday, August 23, 2014

Painting: New Media - hyperlinked pixels - Million Dollar homepage - Cabinet of Curiosity; Pixellotto

Below is a screen shot of the Million Dollar Homepage project by Alex Tew 2005
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

I see that its a super size casing to house all kinds of information.
A truly New Media "Cabinet of Curiosity". 
What is involved if one wants to house such a homepage?
What does it take to maintain this page per year? 

Ques:
I like the idea, and could see that its still going strong... however
If its a good idea, why is it not reproducible? 

Is it reproducible?  Not copy cat style, but as a container for other things.
Could the "casing" hold other things and still have the value of attraction-point?


http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/




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. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for US$1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. 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 aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels.[2][3]
Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon. The Alexa ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127; as of 1 December 2013, it is 59,582.[4] On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross income. His website was also featured in the book "Cool Tech Gadgets, Games, Robots, and the Digital World".
During the January 2006 auction, the website was subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack and ransom demand, which left it inaccessible to visitors for a week while its security system was upgraded. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Wiltshire Constabulary investigated the attack and extortion attempt.[5][6]

The homepage featured a Web banner with the site's name and a pixel counter displaying the number of pixels sold, a navigation bar containing nine small links to the site's internal web pages, and an empty square grid of 1,000,000 pixels divided into 10,000 100-pixel blocks.[12] Tew promised customers that the site would remain online for at least five years – that is, until at least 26 August 2010.[13][14]


Similar websites

Many other sites sell advertising by pixels and also some parodies.[3][16] Tew said of the sites, "[they] popped up almost immediately; now there are hundreds of Web sites selling pixels. The copycats are all competing with each other."[2] He noted that "they have very little ads, therefore I guess it's not going too well for them. The idea only works once and relies on novelty ... any copy-cat sites will only have pure comedy value, whereas mine possibly has a bit of comedy PLUS some actual pull in advertising dollars ... so I say good luck to the imitators!"[53][54]
--wikipedia 

===
Follow up:
pixellotto - 
http://www.cyber-knowledge.net/blog/alexs-tews-pixelotto-is-almost-a-complete-failure/ 
http://www.pixelotto.com/   
not successful, one shot, not repeated
http://realbusiness.co.uk/article/4809-alex_tew_launches_one_million_people
three dollars per subscribers...
23 September 2010
http://munchweb.com/alex-tew 
news of followups. 

Many deadlinks on the million dollar web page... 22% or higher... after 5yrs

Spin off's/copycats/variation cats:


Lists:
http://www.yunasville.com/home/milliondollarhomepage-copycats 
almost all the links do not work, except one or two.  

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.