Pixel Sites...everyone's jumping on the band wagon
Pixel Sites...everyone's jumping on the band wagon
Not a day goes by when I don't get an email or see a site
pushing yet another pixel advertising site but are these really
a good advertising venue or is everyone just jumping on the band
wagon expecting to make a few quick bucks or even get rich.
A search on Google for pixel sites gives 22,7000 results. The
rage started when a 21 year old from England launched an
advertising site where you paid $1 per pixel of advertising and
the page was divided into 1,000,000 pixels. The advertising sold
out and the guy made a cool million dollars! And get this the
last remaining 1000 pixels were sold on ebay for a staggering
$38,100!
The original site - The Million Dollar Homepage was launched on
26th August 2005. The guy then emailed all his friends and told
them to pass on details of his site to their friends and so
on...and then he sold his first 400 pixels for $400. At this
stage the site was getting around 100 hits a day so he started
to contact the press. An IT news site picked it up and ran an
article resulting in 2000 hits an hour, it got ranked by Google
and the hits went up to 35,000 a day.
And as the ball started rolling the visitors to the site
increased, more pixels were sold, the guy made more money and
the press interest increased. The site was getting over 100,000
unique visitors in 2 days and the UK nationals ran stories on
the site. Then the story found its way into US papers, TV
appearances followed and so on....publicity generates publicity.
The site was getting hundreds of thousands of unique visitors
and advertisers were seeing a good click through rate for their
adverts.
Further TV interviews and radio interviews followed, Reuters ran
an article on the site, as did the Wall Street Journal. With the
last few remaining pixels auctioned on eBay the guy made is
million dollars on 11th January 2006 - less of course any costs
he incurred.
And then of course, the site was hacked and money demanded
(which the FBI are currently investigating) but even this led to
more media interest.
By the end of October 2005 hundreds of copy cat sites had
started to spring up. Now there are thousands of them if not
more. Have you visited any of these - most have no adverts on
them, no traffic and no one in their right mind would choose to
advertise on them.
So why have thousands of others thought they could hop on the
bandwagon and make a quick $1,000,000? This guy had an
unprecedented level of media attention, driving thousands and
thousands of visitors to the site.
Even the guy behind the Million Dollar Home Page pixel site
acknowledges that it is not a lasting business idea but a novel
one off idea. There is no long term business concept and it will
only work once. How long it will take those jumping on the pixel
bandwagon to realise this - who knows!