The Million Dollar Homepage

In August 2005 Alex Tew, a twenty-one-year-old from Wiltshire about to start university, put up a page consisting of a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid and sold the pixels at a dollar each in ten-by-ten blocks. Buyers supplied a tiny image and a link. The page filled up over five months into an unreadable mosaic of logos, and the last thousand pixels went on eBay for $38,100, taking the total past a million dollars.

It first appeared in 2005, during early YouTube.

It is the clearest artefact of the moment the web understood itself as an attention market. The idea had no product, no service and no content — the only thing being sold was the fact that people were looking — and it worked because the press covered the stunt, which drove the traffic, which justified the price. The BBC was reporting on it within a month of launch.

Hundreds of copycat pixel pages followed and almost all failed, because the joke only worked once. During the closing auction the site was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack and a ransom demand, and was offline for a week while the FBI and Wiltshire police investigated. Many of the links it sold are now dead, which has made the page an accidental map of the 2005 web.