The Million Dollar Homepage: A viral sensation's checkered past

The story of an early internet artifact that was speedrunning the next two decades of business on the web – in 2005, The Million Dollar Homepage was a website that displayed one million pixels in a 1000x1000 grid, each of which were sold online for $1:

1. Alex Tew
2. Pixel counter and scarcity
3. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack
4. Final sales via eBay auction
5. Link rot
6. Piexlotto sequel, copycats, and other inspiration
7. The Calm app (meditation)
8. The Million Dollar Homepage today

This podcast is Al-generated with NotebookLM, using the following sources, research, and analysis:

• A Million Squandered: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact (Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, 2017.07.21)
• Alex Tew (Wikipedia, 2024.12.29)
• ⁠FAQs⁠ (The Million Dollar Homepage, archived 2011.07.17)
• How the Million Dollar Homepage kid became the $250M app man (The Hustle, 2018.05.12)
• I Bought a Million Dollar Piece of Internet History (YouTube, Nostalgia Nerd, 2021.08.08)
• Story of The Million Dollar Homepage (YouTube, Tech Inspection, 2022.05.10)
• The Million Dollar Homepage (Wikipedia, 2024.12.29)
• The man behind the million-dollar homepage (BBC, 2016.09.15)
• This Entrepreneur Skipped College and Made $1,037,100 in Five Months (Entrepreneur, 2017.04.24)

Not investment advice; do your own due diligence!

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