The Million Dollar Homepage: how pay-to-rank began

A 21-year-old grossed a million dollars selling pixels.

$1,037,100, to be precise.

Each pixel was a speck on a single web page, priced at a dollar, and people lined up to buy them. The Million Dollar Homepage is still the clearest proof that people will pay real money to be seen in a particular spot, in public. Pay-to-rank sites have been reusing that idea ever since.

How the Million Dollar Homepage worked

Alex Tew was from Cricklade, in Wiltshire, England. In August 2005 he was 21, about to start university at Nottingham, and looking for a way to pay for it. On 26 August he put up a page containing a grid of 1,000 by 1,000 pixels.

The rules were simple. $1 per pixel, sold in 10 by 10 blocks, so the smallest spot cost $100. Buyers sent an image, a link and a short line of text that appeared when someone hovered over their square.

There was nothing else on the page, and no reason to visit except to see who had paid to be there.

Why people paid for a 10 by 10 square

The first sale came three days in, when a friend bought 400 pixels for his music website. Word of mouth sold 4,700 pixels in the first two weeks. After Tew had made $1,000, he sent out a press release, and the BBC picked it up.

From there it grew fast. By 26 October, two months in, 500,900 pixels had gone to 1,400 customers, and by New Year's Eve 999,000 were sold.

Why?

Mostly not for the traffic. A 10 by 10 square is a smudge. People paid because the page itself was the news, and owning a square made you part of it. Buying in was a joke that everyone could see you were in on.

Every pay-to-rank site since has run on that same instinct.

The last 1,000 pixels went for $38,100

Tew didn't sell the final 1,000 pixels at a dollar each. He auctioned them on eBay.

The auction ran from 1 to 11 January 2006. MillionDollarWeightLoss.com won with a bid of $38,100, which works out to $38.10 a pixel. Nobody needed those particular pixels. They were the last ones left, and that was enough.

It wasn't a smooth finish. On 7 January 2006, in the middle of the auction, the site was hit by a DDoS attack along with an extortion demand, first for $5,000 and then for $50,000. The page was down for a week while its security was upgraded. The FBI and Wiltshire police believed the attack came from Russia.

The total take was $1,037,100 in five months. Tew expected to keep between $650,000 and $700,000 after costs, taxes and a donation to charity. He dropped out of university after one term, and in 2012 he co-founded Calm, the meditation app.

An app that cost $999.99 and did nothing

Three years later the same urge showed up in an iPhone app, this time without even a link to show for it.

On 5 August 2008, a German developer named Armin Heinrich released I Am Rich. It cost $999.99, the highest price Apple allowed, and all it did was display a glowing red gem and a short message about being rich and deserving it.

Apple pulled it in less than a day. It still sold eight copies, six in the US and two in Europe. Apple refunded two buyers, and at least one said the purchase was an accident.

The Million Dollar Homepage at least gave buyers a link. I Am Rich gave them nothing except proof they had paid, and some people bought it anyway.

Where all those pixels went

Retellings of the success story usually skip what happened to the links.

In 2017, a check of the page's 2,816 links found 547 dead, or 19.4%, with another 489 redirecting to a different domain. By April 2019, about 40% had suffered some kind of link rot.

The page is still online, but a lot of what people paid to link to isn't. What buyers got, in the end, was a spot on one of the most talked-about pages on the internet for as long as people were talking about it.

How a pay-to-rank board works

Take away the pixels and the model is simple:

• A public board
• Position decided by money alone
• Payments add up, so an entry's total is its rank
• To pass someone, you pay more than they did

Votes, likes and recommendation algorithms have no say in it.

Some people find that refreshing and some find it crass, for the same reason. Most rankings online blend signals you never get to see. Pay-to-rank uses one, and it tells you which.

The mechanics haven't changed since 2005. Only the thing being ranked has.

We built one for girlfriends

MyGirlfriendIsPrettier applies the same model to the oldest argument there is.

You name her, choose an amount starting at $5, and pay. The board sorts entries by total paid, and paying $1 more than the entry above you moves you past it. There's an all-time board, a board for today, and one for each country, so she can be #1 in Morocco while sitting at #40 worldwide.

We added one rule, and it's the one that matters most. The person paying never uploads her photo. Her entry goes live as an unclaimed crown, and you get a private claim link to send her. She verifies her own email, then decides whether to add a photo of herself or remove the entry entirely. How it works covers the rest.

Tew sold squares to anyone with a website. This site sells boyfriends a public claim, and the girlfriend gets the final say.

Is it absurd?

Completely, and that has always been part of the appeal.

If you'd rather start with words, read how to tell your girlfriend she's beautiful so it lands. If you want a number on it, claim her rank.

Why people still pay to be seen

Nobody bought a pixel because the grid was fair. They bought one because the spot was public and it was theirs.

In 2005 the smallest square cost $100. Here, a crown starts at $5.

Sources: The Million Dollar Homepage and I Am Rich on Wikipedia.