Hi guys,

Wow I was just blown away. A couple of days ago I received an email from one of the network marketing companies I work with. The email contained an idea for marketing your business. While the site could possibly be useful for marketing my business, the idea of the site was so awesome that I couldn’t stop thinking about it!

The site is Million Dollar Home Page. The idea of the site is pretty simple. It is run by Alex a University student from the UK who decided to raise money for college by selling advertising space on his web site. He promises to keep the site up for 5 years so any advertisers are guaranteed a link for 5 years.

You pay $1 per pixel and the minimum order is $100 which is a small 10×10 pixel square. You then send Alex your image and where you want it to link to and what alt text you want to use.

So far Alex has raised over $266,000! He has many advertisers you’ll recognize. People like GoldenPalace.com. But also a lot of little guys who are buying the advertising space because Alex’s site is getting so popular! It is currently ranked 6,876 most visited site on the net and is the 2nd biggest “mover and shaker” on Alexa.

I haven’t tried it yet. I’m tempted to put a few hundred bucks into advertising on his site, but at the same time I realize it might not be worth it.

Several other sites have started to steal Alex’s idea. You can see a small advertisement for 20 cent pixels in the middle of Alex’s site. These guys bought 6 spaces for $600 and put an ad on the Million Dollar Home Page. They simply cut their price to 20%. That means they still stand to make $200,000 off their version if enough people advertise with them. What they hope is that by havign an advertisement on the Million Dollar Home Page they’ll get traffic which will help boost all their advertisers, however I don’t think this will be the case. Look at 20 cent pixels. Their Alexa traffic ranking is actually worse than this web site. They’re 361,966 most trafficed site. Keep an eye on them, because if they start putting some other types of ads out there, it could in fact take off. I’m reserving judgement on their site for a few weeks.

A couple of other sites that are doing well is The Million Penny Homepage. Guess what? They charge 1 cent per pixel so thats 1% of what Alex charges. You can get a sqaure for $1. There have been a few others coming up with the idea to do pixels for anywhere from a penny to 25 cents a square. A few have also come up with themed web sites where they donate a percentage of the money to charity or they claim that the money is going to their young children’s college education. One even uses the theme buy Brian a Beer. Some offer animated images. Etc. One enterprising guy has even taken it a step further and gives away the advertising for free. The Zero Dollar Homepage has adsense advertisements and such placed on it so that the author can make some money from clicks, while giving away his advertising space.

On one hand I’m afraid to buy from these guys. Most of the ripoffs will never be popular. A few like the million penny guy (Alexa rank is 101,282) may be worth advertising on, but only as long as they attract a lot of attention. When the fad dies off the traffic will inevitably die off with them.

On the other hand it is a good way to get some 1 way links into your site. Buy a bunch of $1 ads on these sites and get some inbound links to your site. I honestly doubt it will have much search engine effect with google though. Lets say you wanted to launch a new web site and wanted to get some quick inbound links… You could buy a bunch of cheap ads and get 10-20 inbound links to your site. This should at the least get you indexed quickly, although it may not give you any Page Rank.

If you want to check out what is going on in the million pixel game check out The Pixel Wars. They track all the pixel sites, show you how much they charge, and show you a screenshot of how active their sites are.

Keep us posted. Let me know by leaving a comment if you signup for any of these services! I’d like to know how you do.
- Ben Fitts

PS. My buddy Jonathan Wold has ads on several of them. Maybe we can get him to write about his success rate?

PPS. Found a few more free pixel sites if you guys want to try them: Pixel Your Page, A Lot More Traffic, and Pixel Patch Network.

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