28th Sep 2005
Ruminating on that Million Dollar Home Page
A couple of days ago, I spied the link to the The Million Dollar Homepage off of kottke.org. The gist of the page is: there are a million pixels, and advertisers can buy them at $1 per pixel. They put up a graphic in that space that points to their site. The pixels are sold off in 10×10 blocks. It’s the brainchild of a 21 year old student in the UK. A snippet of it looks like this:
So how is the student (Alex Tew) doing? In a few weeks time, he sold enough space to pay for 3 years of college! As of this writing, he’s made $191,000.
Not bad. If nothing else, it proves the notion that a Good Idea Can Come From Anywhere, At Any Time. Hats off to Alex!
Of course, there may be a virtual flood of copycat sites. It’s not a hard idea to implement.
So I’ll toss out a few ideas on what the 2nd generation “ad collage” sites could do to possibly improve on the original:
- Tiers / Geo / Tags - I would have a Global view, and perhaps others that are restricted to a region (within 100 miles of a zip code), and/or a view based on search tags/keywords. You charge more for the ads that appear everywhere, and not as much for ads that are confined to a region or a keyword.
- Zooming - a 10×10 pixel block is a bit small. I was thinking it would be great to have the zooming effect of the Mac dock, so that the ads under the mouse cursor would be magnified. That’s an implementation nightmare though, because it would take 10,000 individual images to do it in HTML. Forget that! On the other hand, you COULD have a draggable window that displays a zoomed in view of the the current block under the cursor (along with its neighbors).
- Zoomed Animation - Alex made a very good choice in not allowing animated gifs. It would be way too hard to look at so many at once! It also gets in the way of his implementation, which is a basically one large concatenated graphic of the ads, along with a huge imagemap. Sane Choice! Now think about my previous idea of a draggable window within the browser frame - within that window, it would be fine for an advertiser to have an animated gif. Of course they would pay a little more for that, as opposed to a zoomed in look at their static gif.
Update: by “Global View”, I just mean a display of ads just like MDHP (for the advertisers that paid extra to be “everywhere”) - I’m not talking about ads placed on some world map.. although that’s a tangent worth thinking about
