Socksmas

I'm getting a kick reading the blog of Alex Tew who started a web site called Million Dollar Homepage. It's an interesting story, this guy is British, 21, just heading off to university and has an idea of how to make some money. He starts a web site with a 1,000 by 1,000 image and sells pixel space at $1 per pixel as advertising. The image is sold off in 10x10 pixel blocks at $1 per pixel so $100 per block. Do the math, he's got to sell 10,000 blocks to sell all of the image space, but when he has that's a cool $1,000,000 he's made.

This was all back in August - he launched the site on August 26th. To date he's sold 683,400 pixels and his web site is getting 200,000 unique visitors per week. His site is listed in Alexa's top 1,000 web sites on the net and Alex has been interviewed across the world and written up by the BBC, the Guardian, The Times (UK), and now the Wall Street Journal. More to the point his advertisers actually seem very happy with their investments - they are getting lots of hits.

But if you do the math something doesn't quite ad up. If he's sold 600,000+ pixels and there's 200,000 unique vistors per week that means only 33 unique vistors per 100 pixel block per week. Sure visitors will click on more than one ad per visit (I clicked on about a half dozen out of curiosity) but that doesn't really amount to thousands of hits per week, let alone per day. So either some ads are getting much more traffic than the average (which given the variation and size and prominence may be quite try) or things are not quite as they seem.

Interestingly this is an idea where execution wasn't really that important - his site works and is simple but its not very automated and took him and his friends a lot of effort to maintain - some of its many immitators are far more automated. This idea was all about being the first and getting publicity as the first. Its also probably going to spawn many studies of how a simple idea grows and explodes on the Internet. From its early stage with word of mouth publicity to mass press coverage.

I'm sure he will eventually sell all 1,000,000 pixels. After that then what? Well Alex says the site will be alive for 5 years minimum. I'll be interested to see how his web site traffic holds up, and just what new ideas he comes up with. Personally when the site is full he should start letting people trade the pixels and take a percentage of each trade. Even if people are selling out for a lower price he'll still make money. But perhaps he wants to keep the million dollar homepage the same, as a monument to his idea and phenomenally good timing and good fortune (pun intended).

Oh, and the title of this blog entry - well if you read Alex's blog you'll see he is more than a little obsessed with socks. He keeps on talking about how many socks he'll be able to buy with all that cash. Mmmmm socks. Sounds rather like Baldrick and his turnip obsession.