The Million Dollar Homepage: what it was, what it made, and whether it still works
In one line: in 2005 a 21-year-old student sold a 1000×1000 grid of pixels at $1 each and walked away with $1,037,100. The page still loads today — but click the ads and you'll find a graveyard. This page tells the whole story straight, then shows you what a 2026 version has to fix. This site is that version.
August 2005: a broke student and a grid
Alex Tew was from Cricklade, a small town in Wiltshire, and about to start a business degree at the University of Nottingham. He didn't want three years of debt. Sitting in bed one night he wrote a list titled “How to make a million dollars,” and the idea that stuck was almost stupidly simple: a web page with a million pixels, sold at a dollar each, in 10×10 blocks so the smallest ad you could buy was a $100 square.
The site went live on 26 August 2005. He spent about £50 registering the domain and setting it up. His brothers were the first “advertisers.” Then a press release went out, the BBC picked up the “student beats tuition fees” angle, and the story outran the product. Within months the grid was nearly full.
The exact numbers
The neat part is the ending. With 999,000 pixels sold, Tew put the final 1,000 up for auction on eBay rather than just selling them flat. The listing turned into its own news beat, and the winning bid landed at $38,100 — an average of $38 per pixel for the last scrap of the wall. Add it up and the grand total was $1,037,100, sourced from the public record of the project. Costs were a domain and a bit of hosting, so read that figure as very close to profit.
One footnote most retellings skip: in January 2006, just as the grid finished, the site was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack and an extortion demand — pay up or stay offline. Tew refused, the FBI was brought in, and the page rode it out. The million dollars was already banked.
Is it still up? Yes — but the links rotted
Go and load milliondollarhomepage.com right now. It's been frozen since 2006 — same image, same layout, no updates. The pixels are exactly where their buyers put them. That's the good news.
Now click a dozen of the ads at random. Several will fail: a dead domain, a “this site is for sale” parking page, a redirect to something unrelated, or a plain 404. There was no archive, no permalink, no fallback — each ad pointed at an outside server, and when that server went away the ad became a coloured rectangle pointing nowhere. This is link rot, and on a page that's meant to last forever it's the single biggest design flaw. You paid for a spot on the internet; twenty years later the spot is still there and the link behind it isn't.
We don't quote a precise dead-link percentage because nobody has audited all 2,800-odd links this month and we won't invent a figure. The honest test is the one you can run yourself in thirty seconds: open the original and start clicking.
Why it worked once — and can't be copied by copying it
The idea was a lightning strike, and lightning doesn't hit the same field twice. Dozens of imitators launched in 2006 — million-pixel this, million-dollar that — and almost every one died empty, because the thing being sold was never the pixels. It was the novelty and the press, and those were spent. Tew himself moved on; a few years later he co-founded Calm, the meditation app, which turned out to be the bigger business.
So a modern remake can't sell itself as an ad channel — that story is over, and we say so plainly on the how-it-works page. What it can do is fix the mechanics the 2005 version got wrong. Four things break over time:
- Permanence. Every buyer needs their own URL, one that outlives the seller — not just a spot in one giant image.
- Honest link marking. Paid links must carry
rel="sponsored". In 2005 that tag didn't exist; today, skipping it is against Google's rules. - Something to read. A logo at 10×10 pixels carries no information. A name and one sentence do, and they survive being quoted by a search engine or an assistant.
- Mobile. A fixed 1000-pixel canvas is unreadable on a phone. Half the people who reach this site are on one, so the board is a list, not a canvas.
2005 original vs this board, side by side
| 2005 original | This board (2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Price per pixel | $1 (2005 dollars) | €1 |
| Smallest purchase | 10×10 block — 100 px, $100 minimum | 3 pixels, €3 |
| What a pixel buys | A square of a shared image map | A point of rank on one ordered board |
| Reading it | Squint at 2,800 logos at 10×10 | A list of names, one sentence each |
| Per-buyer page | None — one big image map | Yes — a permalink at /p/name |
| Proof it works | None published | Clicks and real cost per click, per listing |
| Link marking | Plain links (rel=sponsored didn't exist yet) | rel="sponsored" — paid, and marked as paid |
| Can you move up later? | No — the grid was fixed at purchase | Yes — buy more pixels, they add up |
| Mobile | Fixed 1000 px canvas, no zoom | A list. It was always going to be a list. |
Right now 999,917 of the 1,000,000 pixels are still free, 7 listings have paid for the rest, and rank #1 costs €29. If you want the modern-remake framing on its own, there's a page for that: is there a new Million Dollar Homepage? And if you're weighing it purely as cheap permanent ad space, see buying pixels as advertising.
Common questions
How much did the Million Dollar Homepage make?
$1,037,100 gross. Alex Tew sold 999,000 pixels at $1 each in 10×10 blocks, then auctioned the final 1,000 pixels on eBay, where the winning bid reached $38,100. He was a 21-year-old student and the running costs were close to nothing, so almost all of it was profit.
Is the Million Dollar Homepage still online?
Yes. milliondollarhomepage.com has been left untouched since early 2006 and still loads today, image map and all. What's decayed is the links: click around and a large share of the advertiser sites now 404, redirect, or land on parked domains, because the businesses folded and the domains lapsed. The pixels stayed; the destinations rotted.
Who created the Million Dollar Homepage?
Alex Tew, a 21-year-old from Cricklade, Wiltshire, who was about to start a business degree at the University of Nottingham in 2005 and wanted to avoid student debt. He later co-founded Calm, the meditation app now valued in the billions — so the pixel wall was not his last idea.
Why did the Million Dollar Homepage work?
Because the number was a headline. 'Student sells a million pixels for a million dollars' got picked up by the BBC, the press, and then everyone. Buyers weren't paying for a 10×10 ad that nobody could read — they were paying to be part of a story that was already on the news that week. Timing and novelty did the selling, not the pixels.
Can you still buy pixels on a million-dollar homepage today?
Not on Tew's original — it sold out in January 2006 and never reopened. This site is a live 2026 remake with one deliberate change: the pixel is a rank rather than a square of image. €1 a pixel, minimum 3 (€3), paid once through Stripe; whoever owns the most pixels sits at the top of a single ranked board, and every listing gets a permanent page showing what it paid and the clicks it received. The image wall was tried here first and sold nothing — a logo at 30×20 pixels says nothing to anybody.