The Million Dollar Homepage and Other Weird Internet Businesses
Sell pixels. Trade a paperclip for a house. Charge a company to put its name on your shirt for a day.
Some internet business ideas can be explained before the listener has time to object. The Million Dollar Homepage belongs in that category: a grid, a price, and a visible amount of space left to buy.
An advertiser bought space. A sponsor bought promotion. A trader exchanged one object for another. The offers were simple, but the work behind them could be substantial.
The Million Dollar Homepage made the inventory visible
Alex Tew’s page turned advertising inventory into a finite surface. The original offer priced pixels at $1, with a minimum 10 × 10 block. Harvard’s 2017 account records $1,037,100 raised, including an auction for the final pixels. John Bowers, Harvard Library Innovation Lab, Million Dollar Homepage audit, July 2017.
The page itself made the offer legible. Buyers could see the surface filling up and imagine their own little rectangle inside it. The crowded result became part of the attraction.
That is a specific product: space in a shared visual object, linked to a destination. Whether a buyer gained useful visitors is a separate question from whether the seller filled the grid.
| Project | Unit exchanged | Reported outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Million Dollar Homepage | A linked block of pixels | Advertising space sold on a finite grid. |
| One Red Paperclip | One item traded for another | A sequence ending in a house. |
| IWearYourShirt | A day of branded shirt promotion | A paid promotional service. |
| Craigslist | A place to post and find listings | A continuing service built around local needs. |
A useful sales page names the unit just as clearly. If you sell an audit, say which pages and questions it covers. If you sell a tool, let someone understand what they can put in and what comes out.
Try the pixel arithmetic
Price a patch of the homepage
Illustrative calculation using the original $1-per-pixel offer. Enter dimensions in multiples of 10, from 10 to 1,000.
10 × 10 = 100 pixels. Original list-price calculation: $100. Grid area: 0.01%.
The square represents the full grid. The orange patch shows the selected area. Auction pricing is separate.
Area is easy to underestimate. Double both dimensions and the rectangle uses four times as many pixels. A 100 × 100 block contains 10,000 pixels, or 1% of the grid.
The same mistake appears in website planning when a small-looking feature hides several kinds of work. A form has fields, validation, confirmation, delivery, and a person who must respond. A clear unit helps everyone agree on what is being purchased.
| Dimensions | Pixels / dollars | Share of grid |
|---|---|---|
| 10 × 10 | 100 / $100 | 0.01% |
| 20 × 20 | 400 / $400 | 0.04% |
| 100 × 100 | 10,000 / $10,000 | 1% |
| 500 × 500 | 250,000 / $250,000 | 25% |
A paperclip and a T-shirt sold two different stories
Kyle MacDonald began the One Red Paperclip project on July 12, 2005. His account records 14 trades ending in a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan. The result is a sequence of exchanges with a memorable endpoint. Kyle MacDonald, One Red Paperclip project account.
Each trade gave people a reason to follow the next one. The project had a rule anyone could understand, visible progress, and uncertainty about what would happen next.
IWearYourShirt made the participant himself part of the advertising surface. Jason Zook’s account dates the project from January 1, 2009 to May 6, 2013 and reports more than $1 million in revenue. He also records 3,312 videos and more than 12,000 photographs. Jason Zook, IWearYourShirt project history.
That production work is easy to miss when the idea is reduced to “a man wore T-shirts.” The buyer was purchasing promotion, which required material to be made and distributed.
The paperclip result is a barter outcome. The shirt figure is reported revenue. Keep those labels attached when comparing the stories.
Ask Jim about building a useful interactive feature on your website.
The less spectacular offer can have a longer working life
Craigslist’s own history describes a service shaped by the needs of people using it. Craig Newmark’s interview recounts running it as a hobby, bringing in volunteers in 1998, and deciding to run the company in 1999. Craigslist, mission and history; Craig Newmark, interview on the origins of Craigslist.
A local listing has a small, repeatable job: connect someone with something or someone nearby. The visitor can understand the category and act without needing a new stunt each week.
For a game studio, a useful interactive page can work on the same principle. A system-requirements explainer, edition comparison, or release checklist earns its place by helping someone finish a task.
Make the idea easy to describe, then give it enough substance to survive the description. A clever headline gets one visit. A useful result gives the visitor a reason to save the page.
What is the unit?
Name the thing a participant receives: a placement, a service, a result, or an exchange. Put it in one concrete sentence.
What shows progress?
Use an honest count or visible state. Explain what is counted and update it consistently.
What work follows the sale?
List production, support, review, and maintenance. Put an owner next to each task.
What happens when the novelty fades?
Keep a useful outcome, a reliable archive, or a clear end state. Do not leave a visitor guessing whether the project still operates.
The pixels stayed. Some destinations moved
Harvard’s 2017 audit examined 2,816 links: 547 were unreachable, 489 redirected to another domain or resale destination, and 1,780 remained reachable. A reachable page could still have changed purpose. John Bowers, Harvard Library Innovation Lab, Million Dollar Homepage audit, July 2017.
The bars share a 0–2,816 scale. They describe links in that dated audit.
A permanent-looking page depends on destinations it does not control. For your own site, keep a record of outgoing links, review important ones, and replace broken destinations with a useful explanation where appropriate.
The pixel grid is still a recognizable object. Its changing links show why owning the surrounding page and maintaining its contents are separate responsibilities.
Sources and calculations
Project outcomes use the creators’ accounts. Link-status counts come from Harvard Library Innovation Lab’s July 2017 audit. Pixel examples calculate width × height at $1 per pixel; area percentage divides the result by 1,000,000 and multiplies by 100.
Have an odd little web tool worth building?
Send Jim the idea, who would use it, and what result they should get. We can work out a version that belongs on your site and stays useful.
Talk to Jim about an interactive toolFrequently asked questions
Advertisers bought linked pixel blocks on a finite grid. The calculator shows the original list-price arithmetic.
Its documented result was a series of trades ending in a house. That should be described as a barter outcome.
The founder’s account describes a promotional service involving videos, photographs, and other posts alongside the shirt itself.
A clear offer, a visible result, an understandable unit, and a plan for maintaining the page after its first burst of attention.
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References
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