The Million Dollar Homepage No Longer Works?

You should have heard about the MillionDollarHomePage already. What this site offers is a web page of one million pixels divided into 10 by 10 pixel blocks which were available for sale at 100 dollars at a time. When the web site launched, its unique idea captured the media’s interest and generated lots of traffic to the site and where’s traffic advertising usually follows. The site got a phenomenal amount of traffic and in less than 5 short months managed to sell entire one million pixels.

However, as the media hype slowed down, the web site becomes silent and seems unable to keep visitors returning. In fact, its current Alexa ranking rapidly falling to 8,024 from 679 since last year. The future of MillionDollarHomePage is doubtful.

The MillionDollarHomePage is a brilliant idea for providing advertisers with an economically viable advertising model. But that is not enough. To survive the MillionDollarHomePage needs something more, something that will keep visitors returning. Unfortunately, neither the MillionDollarHomePage nor most of the copy cat sites (such as MillionDollarHomePage.com.au and web20MillionDollarHomePage.com, etc.) as far as I know could come up with something more valuable.

ChinaDotCom.biz is the first site that I am aware of that has integrated a semi pixel page (called Pixel adBoard) into an established business portal. They are offering the opportunity for more targeted pixel advertising with sustainable membership base. As they got over 330,000 product categories and trade leads from their members for visitors to browse, they secured sustainable sources of traffic for their advertisers. It also secured a long term return on investment for the advertisers.

In my opinion, the MillionDollarHomePage’s idea only works one time and cannot be copied except for those sites with sustainable sources of traffic like http://ChinaDotCom.biz. Remember – content is king. What do you think?