The Million Dollar Homepage: The Original Pay-for-Position Page

The idea was so simple that it became a news story, and the news coverage became the marketing. Every pay-to-rank board that has appeared since owes something to it, and the differences between them are just as instructive.

How it worked

Tew was about to start a business management degree at the University of Nottingham and wanted to avoid a student loan. He registered a domain and set up basic hosting for about €50, according to Wikipedia’s account, and put up a blank grid:

By New Year’s Eve 2005, 999,000 of the 1,000,000 pixels had sold. The final 1,000 pixels were auctioned on eBay and sold for $38,100.

Wikipedia, The Million Dollar Homepage, accessed October 11, 2026.

Each buyer got a small image linked to their website, placed permanently on the page. There was no ranking: a block in the corner cost the same per pixel as a block in the middle. The early buyers got publicity because the page was in the news. Later buyers paid for the novelty of being part of it.

The attack

Success attracted attention of the wrong kind. On January 7, 2006, Tew received an email from a group demanding $5,000 to prevent a distributed denial-of-service attack. He ignored it. A second demand, for $50,000, followed a week later, and the site was flooded with traffic and went down. It stayed inaccessible for about a week while the host filtered traffic through anti-DDoS software. Wiltshire Constabulary and the FBI investigated.

The episode is a reminder that a page whose value is attention also becomes a target the moment it has attention.

Link rot

The pixels were sold permanently, but the websites behind them were not. Over the years, many advertisers closed, rebranded or let their domains expire.

In 2017, a Harvard report found that of 2,816 original links, 547 were dead and 489 redirected to a different domain.

Wikipedia, The Million Dollar Homepage, accessed October 11, 2026.

By April 2019, the BBC reported that about 40% of the links suffered from link rot, while the page still received several thousand visitors a day. Gizmodo had already noted in 2014, using an analysis by Quartz, that roughly a fifth of the page pointed to dead links.

The page became a monument and a cemetery at once. It is still one of the clearest illustrations of how short the life of a small website can be.

What it got right

• Public price. Everyone knew what a pixel cost. There was no negotiation and no hidden rate card.
• A story people wanted to share. The press covered the page because the idea was absurd and it worked.
• Scarcity. There were only a million pixels. As they ran out, the remaining ones became more interesting.

What it lacked

• Competition for position. A pixel bought in August 2005 stayed where it was. Nobody could pay to move above anyone else.
• Measurement. Buyers had no public record of how many clicks their block received.
• Renewal. Once the grid was full, there was nothing left to sell, apart from resales between buyers.

From pixels to pay-to-rank boards

In August 2026, a German engineer named Jonathan Wilke built outbid.lol, a public list where position is set by the total each listing has paid, and taking a spot means paying at least a dollar more than its displayed total. According to an analysis published two days after launch, the board had about 1.17 million visitors and 991 listings within roughly 66 hours, and dozens of similar boards appeared within days.

The mechanism is the Million Dollar Homepage with the missing pieces added: a ranking that can be contested, prices that rise as people compete, and click counts next to each listing. Our pillar guide to pay-to-rank boards explains how these boards work, how they differ from each other, and what to check before paying for a spot on one.