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Remember this?

milliondollarhomepage.com

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Re: Remember this?

#41
post #10

The original idea was very good and inspired many clones idea. Then the creator got lots of praise and hype. I remember reading articles about investors offering him lots of money. Not to punish his original creative spark, but the story of milliondollarhomepage always reminds me of this english phrase: once you are lucky, twice you are good.

One attempted copy: http://rhizome.org/50k/. Sadly doesn't look like they met their goal.

Re: Remember this?

#42
post #23

I remember hearing about this a long time ago. Even then I thought it was a dumb idea. How many people would repeatedly visit this site to see the adverts, other than the advertisers themselves? Did the fellow ever end up making a million dollars?

He ended up selling them all yeah. Minus tax and whatnot, he still pocketed a tidy sum and decided to forego university (which it was originally to pay for) and become a business god.

I suppose this is evidence that hype works, at least over short time scales, although in this case I guess that his reputation must have subsequently suffered.

Re: Remember this?

#43
post #35

Well timed. The guy behind Million Dollar Homepage just tweeted asking for testers for his latest idea: http://www.webcamconga.com/ The tweet: http://twitter.com/tewy/status/16227749407

facepalm

It's kind of galling how such moronic things can make large amounts of money for one individual, whereas other folks (scientists, mathematicians, engineers) who are really striving to make a fundamental contribution to society barely make ends meet.

Perhaps a lobotomy is the way forward.

Re: Remember this?

#44
post #4

It'd be interesting to see where the advertisers ended up in all of this. I'd imagine they got some SEO out of it but it doesn't strike me that "tabmarks" has gone very far since the million dollar homepage launched. I wonder what the average ROI was, and if the million dollar homepage served as an effective launchpad for anyone or anything.

We bought a 20x20 spot (JobDig, if you can find it on the page you have too much free time). All we got out of it was a bunch of spam from all the 50k homepages and things like that...

The reward from it was we bought the person who made the $400 purchase a t-shirt with the page printed on it, in honor of the "great" idea:)

Re: Remember this?

#46
post #37

Yes. I remember. I have created a first clone of this in my country (Czech republic) and raised few grand for charity. It was my first business (if you can call this business) and a great learning experience. Unfortunately I let the domain expire by mistake - it would be great to have it still running just for a piece of internet history :)

check archive.org

Re: Remember this?

#47
post #25

The same guy had a startup fail spectacularly afterwards, with investor money ('low six figures') down the drain. It was a cheezeburger-style funny video/picture aggregator called PopJam.

"It's LOL over folks:"

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/01/07/its-lol-over-folks-popja...

Re: Remember this?

#48
post #10

The original idea was very good and inspired many clones idea. Then the creator got lots of praise and hype. I remember reading articles about investors offering him lots of money. Not to punish his original creative spark, but the story of milliondollarhomepage always reminds me of this english phrase: once you are lucky, twice you are good.

That's why that if you receive all that news hype and publicity one day, you have to remember that your own bed will always be the best place to sleep at night. Gotta keep grounded.

Re: Remember this?

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy made a million dollars. You know, I had an idea like that once. A long time ago...

At least Tom made a prototype of his idea, rather than letting the "Jump to Conclusions" map fester in his mind forever.

Could you elaborate?? I can barely conclude anything from your comment.

Re: Remember this?

#50
post #43
post #35

Well timed. The guy behind Million Dollar Homepage just tweeted asking for testers for his latest idea: http://www.webcamconga.com/ The tweet: http://twitter.com/tewy/status/16227749407

facepalm It's kind of galling how such moronic things can make large amounts of money for one individual, whereas other folks (scientists, mathematicians, engineers) who are really striving to make a fundamental contribution to society barely make ends meet. Perhaps a lobotomy is the way forward.

The million dollars were revenue; not sure about the guy's net profits when everything was said and done. If I understand correctly, there was some kind of SLA in place -- the people who bought all those pixels expected them to be on line for a certain period of time, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage#DDo...

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