Million Dollar Homepage; Fad Or Fiction

Million Dollar Homepage; Fad Or Fiction

by:
Leon haddock

Over the last
month a new website created by 21 year old student (Alex Tew)
has had a phenomenal impact on the internet advertising world.
You may have heard of milliondollarhomepage.com. If not, it is
a very simple concept for online advertising. Advertisers can
buy pixels on the homepage for $1 a pixel. The minimum order is
100 pixels and with this the advertiser gets a small image that
links from the Milliondollarhomepage to the advertiser’s site.

Now this alone isn’t what made the site successful. Granted it’s
a unique twist on internet advertising, but lets be honest it’s
hardly remarkable. People have been selling spaces for banners
on websites for years. For this site to be successful it needed
one key ingredient, and that is traffic. Hundreds of thousands
of people needed to visit this site to give the advertisers value
for money.

So the young student who came up with the idea submitted a press
release, and sold a story like any good marketer would. How he
was only 21 and came up with this simple website to pay his way
through university. Fortunately for him the worlds press found
his release and published it, as it was a good story. This meant
more people visited the site, and the website traffic increased.
In turn more journalists picked up on the story and published
it. The result was a viral explosion in traffic which meant many
people bought advertising space and it is fair to say the site
has been highly successful.
So is this the new advertising medium of the internet? I am afraid
this author doesn’t believe so. Once the hype starts to die down,
and the story is no longer new, the press will begin to publish
fewer articles on it, and less people will visit the site. This
in turn will lead to even fewer articles being published in the
worlds press, leading to even fewer visitors. This cycle will
continue and what originally made this website successful (viral
marketing) will ultimately lead to its death.

What can internet marketers learn from this? The best way to promote
any new internet venture is to make an interesting story about
it, submit articles and press releases, and if the story is good
enough, watch the viral explosion in visitors.

Of course for long term growth the new site or service has to
be good enough to provide value to visitors, and not just a fad
that captures people’s short term interest. I wish Alex Tew all
the best, but I think he too will accept that this is not a long
term business that can go anywhere from here.

About the author:
Leon Chaddock is a 26 year old Internet marketing expert based
in Hampshire, UK. He is a director of http://www.macranet.co.uk,
and leading article publisher on http://www.articlesnet.co.uk


Circulated by Article Emporium

---