The famous story of the Million Dollar Homepage
Probably the name Alex Tew does not ring a bell, but I think he’s one of the most interesting and creative entrepreneurs of the last 2 decades.
At the moment he’s the co-founder & co-CEO of the meditation app Calm, which has a valuation of $2 billion while writing this. However, this story is not about this success.
We’re going to take a look today at one of his earlier achievements: ‘the Million Dollar Homepage’.
The year is 2005, our protagonist Alex Tew (21 years old) was about to start a three-year Business Management course at the University of Nottingham. But he had a problem.
He was concerned about the student loan, which could take years to pay back. Alex always had had the entrepreneur mindset, so he laid down in his bed, took a notepad and started brainstorming how he could make some money.
For an hour straight he was writing down ideas. Most of them were quite terrible, take for example the ‘Gum Slinger’, which was a small pouch for used chewing gum.
Then a once-in-a-lifetime idea struck him. He would start a website with a million pixels were people could buy a pixel for $1. The concept was that companies would buy pixels to form their logo or make an advertisement, which could include a hyperlink to their website.
Not expecting that it would catch on but without a better idea, Alex began working.
From the outset, I knew the idea had potential, but it was one of those things that could have gone either way.
My thinking was I had nothing to lose (apart from the 50 Euros or so it cost to register the domain and set up the hosting).
I knew that the idea was quirky enough to create interest …
The Internet is a very powerful medium.
Alex Tew, 22 February 2006
2 Days and $50 later
Alex managed to get the website running in 2 days.
The only money he paid was $50 for the registration of the domain name and a basic web hosting package.
The Million Dollar Homepage was born and went live on 26 august 2005. The first sale was quickly a fact.
An online music website owned by one of Alex’s friends bought 400 pixels in a 20 × 20 block. After that, it was a period very calm, but after about a week of lobbying, Alex convinced some friends and family members to buy a total of 4,700 pixels.
Because the sites’ only marketing as though word of mouth, Alex decided that he would hire a PR agency.
He used the $1,000 that the website had generated until now and hoped for the best.
He couldn’t believe what happened next. The PR agency released a press release that was picked up by the BBC. “The site made $3k that day,” recalls Tew. “I was like, ‘Holy crap. I just made this out of thin air. It felt like Monopoly Money’”.
The money starts rolling in
In September two more articles over the Million Dollar Homepage appeared on the technology news website The Register.
By the end of that month, the website had generated $250k for Alex and wasn’t slowing down.
In November the website started becoming popular worldwide. Especially the Americain media showed a lot of interest.
Most of the media praised the website except Don Oldenburg of the Washington Post. Calling it a “cheap, mind-bogglingly lucrative marketing monstrosity, an advertising badlands of spam, banner ads and pop-ups.” .“it looks like a bulletin board on designer steroids, an advertising train wreck you can’t not look at.
It’s like getting every pop-up ad you ever got in your life, at once. It’s the Internet equivalent of suddenly feeling like you want to take a shower.”
On 26 October, more than 500,900 pixels had been sold to 1,400 customers.
By New Year’s Eve, 99.9% of all the pixels had been sold. The site was receiving 25,000 unique visitors every hour.
Because the demand was so great, the last 1000 pixels were sold through an auction on eBay.
The winning bid was $38,100, which brought the gross total to $1,037,100.
Alex had turned $50 in $1,000,000 in only 5 months.
After taxes and a generous donation to the Prince’s Trust (a charity for young people) expect experts that Alex made $650,000-$700,000.
Not bad for a 21-year-old student.
Conclusion
The Million Dollar Homepage is still receiving several thousand visitors every day: milliondollarhomepage
However, only the main page of the website is available, with all sub-pages returning a 404 Not Found message and about 40% of the site’s links are suffering from link rot.
Between 2006 and 2010, Alex launched a series of ventures — Pixelotto, OneMillionPeople, PopJam- trying to copy his first success.
They all failed. In 2012, however, Alex would be struck gold again with the meditation app Calm.
His most impressive success to this day. But that’s a story for another time.
Is there an important message in this story? I don’t know, but I hope it inspires you.
It shows how crazy your idea may sound, it could be a treasure. All you need to do is to believe in it and have a little bit of luck.
Who knows, maybe is the next Alex Tew reading this at this moment. May your dreams come true.