It was a weird, interesting, and ultimately successful (for him) idea — sell 1 million pixels of advertising on a webpage for $1 a piece.
Rake in $1 million dollars. Done.
Alex put this up in 2006. If you go to the page now, it seems largely, possibly completely, unchanged from its initial inception. It’s kind of a cool snapshot of one side of the internet in 2006. There are lots of gambling ads, a bunch of “free” promises, companionship, some ads pointed at the fringes, and several promising to help you make money or get traffic.
If you click on the pixels/ads, you’ll find that most are broken or redirect to something different than the original.
It’s weird colors and images and is very clunky. It strikes me as Donkey Kong crossed with AOL. Nothing stands out (OK, I do see Thomas the Tank Engine). It’s a sea of 8-bit colors. The very opposite of useful advertising.
Who could have possibly extracted the value supposedly provided by this page?
Nobody, of course.
Except Alex.
