What Happened to the Million Dollar Homepage?

It’s one of the internet’s great origin stories. A 21-year-old student needs money for university, has a slightly ridiculous idea, and walks away with more than a million dollars. But the part people forget is what happened after.

All figures below come from the Million Dollar Homepage’s Wikipedia entry, which has the full sourcing.

The idea

Alex Tew, a student from Cricklade in Wiltshire, England, launched the site on 26 August 2005. The page was a 1000 × 1000 grid: one million pixels at $1 each. Since a single pixel is too small to see, they were sold in 10×10 blocks, so the minimum buy was $100. Each block could hold an image and a link.

How fast it sold

• Three days in: the first sale, 400 pixels to a friend’s music website.
• End of September 2005: $250,000.
• 26 October 2005: more than 500,900 pixels sold.
• New Year’s Eve 2005: 999,000 pixels sold.
• 1–11 January 2006: the final 1,000 pixels went to auction on eBay. The winning bid was $38,100, from MillionDollarWeightLoss.com.

Final gross: $1,037,100. After costs, taxes, and a charity donation, Tew expected to keep somewhere between $650,000 and $700,000.

The buyers were a strange, wonderful mix: Yahoo!, Tenacious D, Orange UK, The Times, online casinos, an antivirus company, and a long tail of small businesses.

Then someone tried to hold it to ransom

In January 2006, right in the middle of the final auction, the site was hit by a distributed denial-of-service attack. The attackers demanded $5,000, then $50,000. The FBI and Wiltshire police investigated, and the site was offline for about a week while it was secured. Being the most famous page on the internet had its downsides.

So what happened to it?

Short answer: nothing. And that’s the interesting part.

The homepage is still up. You can visit it today and see the same million pixels, in the same places. But the internet around it kept moving. A 2017 check of the page’s 2,816 links found 547 completely dead and 489 redirecting to different domains. By 2019, roughly 40% of the links had rotted. Even so, it was still getting thousands of visitors a day.

It became a museum by accident: a perfectly preserved snapshot of 2005, slowly turning into a page of broken doors.

What it teaches

• Scarcity sells. A hard limit of one million made every block feel urgent.
• Novelty is a strategy. Half the value was the press coverage, not the pixels.
• Frozen things decay. When nothing can change, the links can only break.

A lot of projects have tried to recreate it since (we rounded up the alternatives you can still join). TheWorldsBillboard took a different lesson from it. Instead of a fixed grid that fills up and freezes, it’s a proportional billboard: no pixel limit, a $3 minimum, and every space gets its own page so there’s always somewhere to land. It’s still early, and you can see everyone who’s on it.