What happened to the Million Dollar Homepage

In August 2005, Alex Tew was 21 and about to start university in England. To pay for it, he put up a page with a grid of one million pixels and sold them for a dollar each. A few months later the grid was full. This is what happened, what went wrong afterwards, and what we took from it when we built Hivefo.

What it was

The page was a square of 1,000 by 1,000 pixels. Buyers paid $1 per pixel, in blocks of 10 by 10, so the smallest purchase was $100. In return they got a tiny image on the grid and a link to their site.

The last 1,000 pixels were auctioned on eBay in early 2006 and went for $38,100. In total the page grossed $1,037,100.

Why it worked

• The story sold the pixels. The first buyers were mostly friends and family. Tew put that early money into press outreach, British media picked the story up, and the coverage brought the buyers. Nobody was searching for a place to buy pixels.
• The price was impossible to misunderstand. One pixel, one dollar. There was nothing to compare and nothing to configure.
• It was finite. A million pixels and no more. As the grid filled, the remaining space became worth more, and the final auction proved it.
• It was first. Buying a block meant being part of something people were talking about that week.

What broke

The copies. Tew counted about 500 sites copying the idea in the first months. None repeated the result. His own follow-up, Pixelotto, charged $2 a pixel and added a prize, and it didn’t get there either. The format was never the valuable part. The moment was. If you are looking for something like it today, see Million Dollar Homepage alternatives.

The links. The page is still online, but it was paid for once and then left alone. In 2019 the BBC reported that around 40% of its links were dead. A visitor today is looking at a snapshot of 2005, and close to half of it leads nowhere.

The space itself. A 10 by 10 block is too small to say anything. It can show a color and a few letters. There was no page behind it and no way to know whether anyone clicked.

What we kept, and what we changed

Hivefo starts from the same idea: one shared map, a fixed number of places, a simple price. We kept those because they are the parts that worked. We changed the parts that didn’t.

• Yearly instead of forever. A hexagon is yours for a year at a time. If a project disappears, its hexagon goes back on the map. The hive stays a picture of what exists now.
• One per website. Nobody can buy a wall of space. Every hexagon is a different project.
• A page behind every hexagon. Each one opens a profile with a link, a description and real numbers: visits, clicks and rank.
• For a specific group. The original was for anyone with $100. Hivefo is for independent makers, so the map means something to the people on it.
• Honest about links. Paid links don’t improve search rankings, and ours are marked as sponsored. What a hexagon buys is visibility.

We can’t recreate 2005, and we aren’t trying to. The useful question is what a shared map looks like when it is built to still be worth visiting in five years. You can see our answer in the hive, or read how it works.