

The ASCII Million Dollar Page - btw0
http://asciimilliondollarpage.com/

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chaosmachine
_$20 per character_

Good luck with that ;)

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metachris
The page even says that the "First screen is for internal use, not for sale"
lol

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jacquesm
Dude must have cash enough, that's $40K down the tubes right there.

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ido
Hilarious!

For those who aren't familiar with it, it's a spoof of this page:
<http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/>

Which although seems pretty pointless, got a ton of publicity a while ago.

EDIT: and apparently actually made its author a million dollars!

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edd
The poor thing about the actual million dollar homepage is the creator (a
university student trying to make some money to pay of his student debt) then
got DDOS attacked to oblivion and had to spend a large amount of the money
trying to keep the site up. The DDOS attackers obviously knew he had come in
to a large amount of money and held him to ransom.

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davecardwell
I hadn’t heard about that. Sounds like the attack itself and the resulting
investigation weren’t very successful:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage#DDo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage#DDoS_attack)

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idlewords
I bet if he had seeded it to make it look like a few people had already paid,
he might have made some sales by now, joke site or not.

I recently launched a website with a gatekeeping fee pegged to the number of
users (fee goes up $0.001 per user) and it surprised me how many people
assumed that I started by charging $0.00. Do you really want to be the first
paying user of any service?

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olefoo
I like that idea, it combines 'act now while it's still cheap', with the idea
that the site may not be as useful until it has a certain number of users, and
thus it makes sense to charge less to early users.

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tezza
The original fitted in approximately 1 browser screen. This ASCII one involves
scrolling.

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dejan
I can't avoid hating everything that is for pure money making and no user
value creation. It is also an advice for startups.

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btw0
The site has the potential value to bring traffic to advertised web sites.

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avinashv
Well...he's made 20 bucks.

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sid
40 now, seems like there is a 'Z' and an '@' there now :D Seriously even if he
makes 100K, heck 10K im going to label this guy as one of my idols LOL ...

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est
> Aug 16, 2009

Inspired by yourworldoftext.appspot.com ?

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Raphael
I believe you may be right.

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datawalke
I hope they know rel="nofollow" has to be added to all those links.

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wmeredith
It doesn't matter anyway, Goog won't crawl more than 100 links on a page.

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movix
I would have bought into that if only he'd done a Flash version.

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johnohara
This site looks easy to maintain.

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joshu
No Unicode?!

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sho
Actually ..

    
    
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

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vindi
pfff

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TweedHeads
In order to be original, you have to be, well, original.

Fail.

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jacquesm
Oh, come on, you're just jealous ;)

I don't know how often this has been done again, the first time it was a
pretty good thing though, one of those 'why didn't I think of that' things.

Makes you wonder though, there must be some other immensely viral idea that
can make you money in a short time lurking somewhere waiting to be discovered.

It would help if he made it readable though...

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TweedHeads
I was one of the many that said to myself "why didn't I think of that" the
first time.

Not this time.

I'll give you one original idea to make you instant millionaire on the web.

\- Start with a thousand dollars

\- Every week, ask the wisdom of crowds for a way to double that purchasing,
reselling, investing in anything the majority decides.

\- Repeat ten times till you get to a million dollars.

\- Keep the crowds amused with your vicissitudes in a daily blog.

\- Profit!

Remember the red-paper-clip guy? something like that but the audience decides
what to do with the money, and the whole intent is to double it every time.

Show the world we can be millionaires by investing wisely following the wisdom
of crowds.

For example, first week buy $200 t-shirts for $5 and resell them for $10.

Second week, buy an old car for $2000 and resell it for $4000.

Those are just stupid examples, the audience should decide wiser.

Imagination is all you need to be a millionaire.

And originality...

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edw519
Here's a simple idea to make you an instant thousandaire and you don't even
need a computer...

Purchase a mailing list of 4,096 football bettors.

Then start mailing postcards every week proclaiming that you have a system and
a newsletter absolutely positively guaranteeing at least one "Lock of the
Week".

Week 1 - Mail a postcard to 2,048 selecting the Tennessee Titans as the "Lock
of the Week". Mail the other 2,048 a postcard selecting the Buffalo Bills as
the "Lock of the Week". Keep only the 2,048 names whose team actually won.

Week 2 - Mail 1,024 postcards with one "Lock of the Week" and 1,024 with the
other team as the "Lock of the Week".

Repeat for 3 more weeks.

By the time the season starts, you will have mailed 5 consecutive correct
"Locks of the Week" to 128 bettors. The probability of this was (.5)^5 or
.03125. Damn, you're good!

Now sell those 128 bettors your Absolutely Positively Guaranteed "Lock of the
Week" Newsletter for $1,000 but only if they buy before Sunday.

If half the bettors buy your newsletter then your income will be $64,000 with
a printing and mailing cost of less than $2,000. Not bad.

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jacquesm
hehe, I heard about that one on a slightly different tune, send your letter to
'investors' and do it 10 times in a row (so 2047 letters in total).

Then go to the last investor with an investment proposal for a lot of $ and
disappear into the sunset with the loot :)

