The Gajillion Dollar Internet $$$

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about The Million Dollar Homepage is how few people have heard of it. This disturbs me because it means that this guy made a $ million, cold, in advertising that your common joe will never see.

The Wiki article expounds that knock-off sites are rampant, but that “the limited success of these imitators may have an impact on its long-term sustainability.” Even so.

This guy has already made over $5000.

Pixel4Jesus has made nearly $70,000. All in the Lord’s name, of course.

And there are a boatload of them. This pixel ads list contains over 1175 pixel advertising sites, and growing. If you average one million pixels per page (as most of them do), and say they run an average of even as low as ten cents per pixel (though I’d assume the average is slightly higher), then that’s $117,500,000 worth of adspace.

In comparisn, The Mile Wall is refreshingly different, if still a very strange beast of an advertising gimmick, and as yet relatively unknown. Since Kottke linked it, I’m sure it will launch into the (internet’s) public eye soon enough. At the least, at $1 per square inch (a square inch being being 5625 pixels by the site’s standards), you’re getting a lot more ad for your money’s worth. At a mile wide and 7″ tall, the guy only stands to make $443,520. We’ll see how that works out for him.

It must be a rough life, taking a blank page in the middle of internet nowhere and turning it into an ad revenue Mecca. Pixel ad sites will be short-lived, but you know this has started a trend of outside-the-box internet ad junkies, who will come up with increasingly weird ways to sell worthless internet space for thousands of dollars.

Personally, I’m jealous as fuck. I’m interested to see where it goes. And I wish I’d thought of it.