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!
About the author:
Rachel Gawith runs her own home based
business website which recommends a good online business,
has ebook reviews, software reviews, resource reviews,
an article dircectory, link exchange and free classified
site. Pop over and have a look athttp://www.computerincome.net
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