> The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for US$1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars for the creator.
The sheer "internet"-ness of the idea at the time was brilliant. It also seems like the kind of thing you can only really pull off once. And it was funny watching it slowly fill up, discovering what kind of businesses turned out to spend on something like this, what colours they attempted to choose to stand out, and how the result was a chaotic mess with everyone fighting for attention. Subtle commentary and somewhat prophetic of the current situation with ads...
