The Million Dollar Homepage is one of the rare websites whose entire business model can still be understood by looking at it for about five seconds: one million pixels, sold as advertising, until there were none left.
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Alex Tew launched the site in August 2005 while preparing for university. The page was a 1,000-by-1,000 pixel grid. Advertising space cost one dollar per pixel, although buyers had to purchase at least a 10-by-10 block, making the practical minimum $100.
Each buyer supplied a tiny image, a destination URL, and hover text.
That was it.
No recommendation engine. No audience targeting. No dashboard full of conversion funnels. Buy a visible square on the weird page everyone is talking about and hope people click it.
The last 1,000 pixels were auctioned in January 2006. The final reported gross passed the original million-dollar target, reaching $1,037,100.
A website that became the artifact
The interesting part in 2026 is that the homepage itself is now more valuable as a historical object than most of the advertisements ever were.
The grid is a compressed commercial cross-section of the mid-2000s Web. There are tiny company logos, gambling sites, novelty businesses, personal projects, services that vanished, and links pointing into twenty years of accumulated link rot.
Some destinations still work. Many do not.
The pixels remain anyway.
That makes the page strange in a way a screenshot would not be. It is still an actual web document with actual links embedded in the original idea. You can move around the mosaic and find surviving businesses beside dead domains, redirects, abandoned brands, and things that now require their own archaeological expedition.
The site also demonstrates how little technology an Internet phenomenon actually needs. The concept was visual, finite, easy to explain, and visible while it filled up. Every sale altered the public object, and the remaining empty space showed exactly how much of the experiment was left.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes surviving web artifacts like this because an old page can become more informative as the links around it decay.
The Million Dollar Homepage began as an ad board.
Now it is also a map of what survived badly.