The Million Dollar Homepage, Twenty Years On
The Million Dollar Homepage sold a grid of pixels once, at a flat price, in 2005. Here's what a pay-to-rank leaderboard had to add that it never had.
A 21-year-old sold a million pixels for a dollar each in August 2005, and he never changed the price on a single one of them.
That's the part of the Million Dollar Homepage everyone remembers. It's also the part that gets it filed under the wrong category.
Alex Tew was a business student from Wiltshire, England, about to start a three-year course at the University of Nottingham. He needed money for it and didn't want a part-time job.
So he built a page. A grid, 1,000 pixels wide and 1,000 tall, sold off in 10-by-10 blocks at $100 a block.
It worked. The site sold out completely, all one million pixels, in 138 days, according to Quartz's count.
Nobody has matched that since.
What gets left out of the retelling is what the price actually did while that happened, and what those million squares look like twenty years later. Both answers change how much of a leaderboard this thing really was.
What the Million Dollar Homepage Actually Sold
Every buyer paid the same rate for the entire run: $1 a pixel, $100 minimum. Tew never raised it as demand climbed. He never lowered it as the grid filled in.
The buyer on day one paid exactly what the buyer on day one hundred paid.
There was no early bird and no late tax.
Buy a block. Drop in your own image and a link. That was the whole product.
One exception. The very end.
The final 1,000 pixels weren't sold at $1 a piece. Tew auctioned them on eBay instead, and the winning bid landed at $38,100, according to Harvard's Library Innovation Lab, pushing his total to $1,037,100.
That's a 38x markup on the last 0.1% of the page.
Here's the number the retellings never bother to work out. Divide $1,037,100 by 1,000,000 pixels and the whole page averaged just over $1.04 each, once that final auction spike is folded in.
Four cents.
That's the entire premium a scarcity clock added to a page that otherwise never moved its price at all. Scarcity at the very end did more work than a flat price had done across the previous 999,000 pixels.
If you're ever selling a placement at one fixed rate for the whole run, that's the lesson worth stealing: auction the last of it. A flat rate leaves real money on the table right at the point demand is highest.
By 15 September 2005, three weeks after launch, the page had already sold 15,100 pixels, according to a 2025 retrospective from db8 citing the site's own archived numbers. That's before a single press mention.
Word of mouth alone moved 15,100 pixels in three weeks, because owning a piece of something people were already talking about was the entire pitch. No ad budget required.
The buyers weren't just friends padding out the grid. Once the story spread, The Times, Beer.com and a run of online casinos bought in alongside them.
"I wasn't targeting any advertisers in particular, really just anyone who wanted to buy pixels," Tew told the BBC in 2016.
That's the whole targeting strategy: none.
A flat price with no rank attached doesn't need one. Anyone with $100 got the identical deal as the brand with a media budget behind it.
It Was Never a Leaderboard
Here's the correction most retellings skip.
A leaderboard sorts by rank. The Million Dollar Homepage never did that.
Position on the grid was picked by the buyer, not assigned by how much they'd paid. Everyone paid the identical rate regardless of when they showed up or how much space they wanted. Nothing was ever compared to anything else, so there was no rank to fight for in the first place.
The confusion is understandable. Both ideas share the same one-line pitch: attention, for sale, to anyone who can pay.
Only one of them ever let today's dollar outbid yesterday's.
That distinction matters more now than it did in 2005. "Pay-to-rank leaderboard" became its own category of website after outbid.lol went viral in August 2026, and we've written about what one of those actually is and the wave of clones that followed.
Every one of them does the thing the Million Dollar Homepage never did: it re-sorts, continuously, by the amount paid.
Every post filed under leaderboard on this site works through some version of that re-sort. This one is about the version that came before any of them existed. Twenty years is long enough that most of today's pay-to-rank boards weren't live for a single day of it.
Call the Million Dollar Homepage the ancestor if you want the tidy version. The honest version is that it's a cousin. Same instinct: sell attention in small, affordable pieces to whoever wants one. Completely different mechanic underneath it.
What a Pixel Never Had to Survive
A one-time sale has one job left after the money clears: stay up.
Harvard's Library Innovation Lab checked in 2017. Of 2,816 links embedded in the page, accounting for 999,400 pixels, 547 were dead outright and 489 redirected somewhere else entirely.
| Status, checked 2017 | Links | Pixels represented |
|---|---|---|
| Still resolving to the original site | 1,780 | roughly 512,400 |
| Dead, no page loads at all | 547 | 342,000 |
| Redirected to a different domain | 489 | 145,000 |
The single biggest graphic on the page, a chain of blocks strung together into one image, belonged to a domain the Library Innovation Lab called "seemingly defunct" even back in 2017.
Whoever paid the most for the single biggest graphic on the page ended up with the least to show for it.
Quartz ran its own check five years later. Its method was blunt but fair: software loaded every linked page, and anything that didn't resolve within ten seconds got marked dead.
That's a generous bar, and 22% of the page still failed it by 2022. A further 23,200 pixels were never linked to anything at all. Their buyers paid and simply never uploaded an image, so those squares sit blank, "reserved," forever.
The page was still online when we checked it this week, exactly the way db8's 2025 piece described it: a museum with a growing number of broken exhibits.
None of that is a knock on the idea. It's the bill that comes due on any placement sold once and never checked again.
If you're holding one right now, the audit takes fifteen minutes. Open the link you bought two years ago. Click it.
If it 404s or redirects to a parking page, it isn't doing anything for you. The same goes if it now points at a domain that changed hands entirely. If it's dead, check the Wayback Machine for what it used to point to before you decide whether it's worth chasing a fix.
Put a date in your calendar to check it again in six months, and keep that date.
The Four Things a Modern Board Had to Add
Take the Million Dollar Homepage's mechanic and ask what has to change before it becomes an actual pay-to-rank board. Four things.
| Mechanic | Million Dollar Homepage, 2005 | A pay-to-rank leaderboard, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Fixed at $1 a pixel for the whole run | Only ever climbs. Taking the top spot costs a dollar over whoever holds it right now |
| Position | Picked by the buyer, wherever they liked on the grid | Sorted continuously by the amount paid, no picking involved |
| Duration | One payment, standing until the page rots or somebody deletes it | A season: rank 01 held 30 days straight, not before the season itself turns 90 days old. When it's won, every amount resets to zero |
| Who gets named | Nobody. Buyers appear only through their own logo and link | Backers are named publicly. Anyone running sabotage against a listing never is |
There's a fifth difference underneath all four, about where the money goes once you've paid it.
Tew's dollars left the page forever the moment they cleared eBay or the checkout, straight into his own pocket. A listing's money on a modern board stays attached to the listing itself: anyone can back it further, and every backer who does is named in public.
On The Board, that's what "sorted continuously" looks like right now:
Every one of those three positions can move the next time somebody pays more than the person currently above them. Nothing on the Million Dollar Homepage's grid could ever do that.
The pixel you bought in 2005 sits exactly where you put it, whether anyone still looks at it or not.
Every listing on The Board is a paid placement, sorted by nothing else, disclosed as exactly that here and everywhere else it comes up.
What a Visitor Actually Costs You, Either Way
$100 on the Million Dollar Homepage in 2005 bought a permanent 10-by-10 block with no traffic numbers attached to it at all. What it sent you depended entirely on how many of the page's visitors happened to click your particular square, and nobody was measuring that for you.
We've already run the channel-by-channel numbers on what a website visitor actually costs in 2026. We've also priced what a single dollar of advertising buys on the platforms people default to. Separately, we looked at buying traffic outright, at the bottom of the market, where clicks run in fractions of a cent and mean almost nothing.
The comparison that actually matters isn't dollars per pixel. It's this: does the placement hand you any numbers after you've bought it, or just a link?
A one-time wall gives you a link and nothing else.
A live-ranked position gives you public numbers instead: impressions and clicks, counted and shown for as long as you hold the spot, not tallied once and forgotten.
Say you're weighing a $250 footer badge that never expires against a $250 entry on a live board. The badge's fate from here is entirely about upkeep: nobody ever raises its price, but nobody keeps it working except you. The $250 entry can be beaten by $251 tomorrow, and beaten again the day after that, but its numbers update in public for the whole time it holds.
Before You Buy Either Kind
Ask one question before you pay for any placement, ranked or not: can the price ever be beaten?
If the answer is no, you're buying a wall. Treat it like the Million Dollar Homepage's buyers should have. Budget for exactly one payment, and write down the date you paid it. Then check the link on a schedule, instead of hoping.
If the answer is yes, you're buying rank, not space. Whoever pays a dollar more than you tomorrow moves ahead of you tomorrow.
That's not a flaw in the mechanic. It's the entire point of it: rank is a live number, not a plaque on a wall.
Three checks, either way:
- This week: click every permanent link you've bought in the last two years. Fix or replace anything dead.
- This month: if you're weighing a live-ranked placement, check what the current top position actually costs before you commit to a number.
- This quarter: put a repeat date on the calendar for both. A wall needs checking because it rots. A rank needs checking because it moves.
Alex Tew's page still exists, and 78% of it still works. That's not a bad twenty-year batting average for a page nobody ever went back to update.
But it never had to answer for itself the way a live leaderboard does.
Buy the kind that answers back.