
“Sequel” to the million dollar homepage using WebGL - jumprite
https://milliondollarmetropolis.com/#
======
surround
If you can capture enough people’s attention, you can profit from it, whether
it be from an admission fee or from advertising, or even asking for donations.

The original Million Dollar Homepage from 2005 wasn’t just ambitious - it was
absurd. One pixel for one dollar? A website with an oddly specific title and
purpose? The goal of a million dollars? The novelty of it all quickly captured
the attention of people, and soon, the press. In under a year, every single
one of those outrageously expensive ad slots were sold, and Alex Tew - just a
student at the time - walked away a millionaire.

Hundreds of spectators decided they weren’t going to miss out on an
opportunity to make a bunch of money fast and easy. So-called “pixel ad”
websites began popping up everywhere. They would change a few things up, in an
attempt to recreate the novelty which drove the original to success. One such
website called itself the _ten-thousand_ dollar homepage. Another tried to
sell a single pixel for a million dollars. None were successful.

The idea of permanently selling previously worthless ad-space at a high price
for a high profit had already been done. Despite their efforts, these copy-cat
websites were not original enough and did not capture people’s attention.

Is the idea of a bunch of 3D rendered rectangles enough to capture people’s
attention? I don’t think so.

The “Million Dollar Metropolis” is not even close to a sequel. It’s the latest
in a long series of failed get-rich-quick schemes.

And as long as I’ve captured your attention with this comment, consider
leaving a donation with the link in my bio.

~~~
frouge
Surprisingly more than 200 people upvoted this link

~~~
MasterScrat
Many comments here just sound too enthusiastic as well.

I suspect something fishy is going on (as in, paid for upvotes and comments).

~~~
surround
My comment was downvoted twice immediately after posting it, before others
began to upvote it.

------
dmart
Cool homage to the original, but I think not displaying the full city upon
first load (and using fog to obscure out-of-view parts) diminishes the appeal
to potential advertisers.

Who would want to buy a building out in the corner? Maybe the starting
location should be randomized, at least.

~~~
floatrock
First rule of real estate: location location location.

Although for that to make sense, each building should be tokenized with an
auction-backed tradable token so people could speculate on real estate how
they see fit (should it still be called real estate?)

Bonus points if you geocode the entry location based on IP.

Or we could, you know, spend our efforts not building an asinine virtual
advertising pissing field.

~~~
StavrosK
> should it still be called real estate?

Fake estate.

~~~
WiseWeasel
Virtually Real Estate

~~~
munk-a
Real E-State - there you go.

~~~
Zobat
It's banners, so "reel estate"?

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pgt
I tried to zoom out immediately and it felt constraining that it kept
reverting to a zoom level. Let me zoom to the limits! Maybe then I'll buy a
skyscraper "over there."

------
Waterluvian
This completely misses the point of the original. That it's dead simple,
trivial to navigate, easy to see big buys.

This thing just chugs my phone and feels awful to interact with.

~~~
friedman23
I'm pretty sure the point of the original was to net the creator a million
dollars.

~~~
thaumasiotes
He would have had to charge a lot more if he wanted to net a million dollars.
He grossed less then $1.1M.

~~~
mulmen
He did make a million dollars though?

~~~
Symbiote
"After costs, taxes and a donation to The Prince's Trust, a charity for young
people, Tew expected his net income to be $650,000–$700,000."

From Wikipedia.

~~~
mulmen
Yeah I missed the "net" in the original comment. My bad. He _grossed_ just
over a million.

------
iblaine
The original million dollar home page was motivated by advertisers wanting SEO
benefits. It was picked up by major media, so those pixels had value in
addition to the SEO benefits. This WebGL version doesn't have that value. I
think it's a scam but people can make their own opinions.

~~~
ASalazarMX
Also, times have changed a lot since then. This should be the Billion Dollar
Progressive Responsive Adaptive Single-Page Web App.

~~~
geerlingguy
And it needs to be built with microservices and run on a multi-cloud
Kubernetes installation with a service mesh.

~~~
munk-a
And written in Elm of course.

~~~
schroffl
Well, to be fair, Elms WebGL interface is surprisingly easy to use.

~~~
DonHopkins
And it needs to use Pones!

What are Pones, you might ask! Well, they're kind of like Nodes, but more
vague and general purpose, so you can use them everywhere, for everything, no
matter what you're doing!

I like to think of a PONE as the ultimate middleware between COM and NT. So
you can't have a COMPONENT without a PONE! But they're great with all kinds of
other stuff, too, like XML Pones, and JSON Pones, and Kuber Pones, and
Reactive Pones, and Elm Pones, and Corn Pones.

Pones are disruptive, yet social!

Pones are taking the Internet by storm!

Live long and use lots of Pones!

“You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions
is.” -Mark Twain

Mark Twain: Corn-pone Opinions

[http://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html)

>[...] Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly
speaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly
from the approval of other people. The result is conformity. Sometimes
conformity has a sordid business interest -- the bread-and-butter interest --
but not in most cases, I think. I think that in the majority of cases it is
unconscious and not calculated; that it is born of the human being's natural
yearning to stand well with his fellows and have their inspiring approval and
praise -- a yearning which is commonly so strong and so insistent that it
cannot be effectually resisted, and must have its way. A political emergency
brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties --
the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger
variety, the sentimental variety -- the one which can't bear to be outside the
pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold
shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants
to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!"
Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose
approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor
and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will
dump his life-long principles into the street, and his conscience along with
them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances. [...]

------
legitster
Pretty clever little gimmick.

As a marketer, I can't imagine that there is a ton of long term value here.
But it seems like that's baked in because it's a one time payment, and the
prices are very reasonable.

There's also just enough customization options that I am already thinking of
clever ways I could try to stand out.

This is like marketing catnip.

~~~
lloyddobbler
Yep to the catnip.

As others have mentioned, though, the big benefit of the first million-dollar
homepage was the SEO value - along with the fact that for a few hundred bucks,
you could have a bold ad that caught someone's eye amidst the chaos (FREE
HOSTING comes to mind). The novelty of the project sold it to mass-market PR,
which then sold it to the public, who then shared it with their friends.

As pretty as this project is, I think there's a lot less novelty here.

The novelty here is more WebGL, as well as the "Hey, someone's doing this
again." WebGL implementation will attract the attention of a select few
people; the "here we go again" will likely also capture a few clicks, but none
like the first time around. The story just isn't as good for mass-media to run
with.

So while my right brain starts to go through 'how can I work with this?', my
left brain chimes in with 'I can get a whole lot more ROI from $2k worth of
Facebook ads this time around.'

Still a cool idea and very pretty to look at, though. If you get in early (so
you can stand out), it might be a good buy.

------
SkyMarshal
This is cool but you may need better discoverability.

The original million dollar webpage had the entire block of 1million pixels
fit within a standard resolution browser window. Users could mouse over every
pixel on it to see what each was without scrolling around on the page.

That site inspired someone to create the Million Dollar Wall, which scrolled
sideways for like a mile, and was trying to sell ads on it. But it didn't work
b/c scrolling is not fun or interesting.

You might have a similar challenge with this site.

~~~
folli
I'm not sure if scrolling was the reason for it not working. Maybe it's just
an idea that only works once.

~~~
SkyMarshal
That’s possible too. My evidence is only anecdotal, but when I tried the MDH I
moused over almost every pixel to see who had bought it. It was quick and
easy, no friction. But when I tried the MDW I scrolled for a few seconds, then
got tired of it and lost interest. The wall went on forever, but I cbf to
scroll through it all.

------
samizdis
This calls to mind the concept of The Street in Neal Stevenson's Snowcrash:

 _" That's why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building
on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people
on earth will see it every day of their lives."_

~~~
reaperducer
_Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest,
hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives._

This happens in real life.

AT&T, Verizon, Nokia, Garmin, and other brands put up flashy "flagship" stores
on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago knowing there's no way they can ever sell
enough gadgets to pay the rent. Those are nothing more than three dimensional
billboards for the brand in a district where billboards are prohibited. It's
not even a secret.

------
ada1981
The creator of the original went on to build Calm.com which is got to be
approaching a Billion in valuation.

~~~
echelon
You weren't kidding:

[https://angel.co/company/calm](https://angel.co/company/calm)

This product doesn't make any sense to me, but major kudos on this guy
delivering success after success.

~~~
dclusin
If half of what people say about the benefits of meditation are true then
paying for a good curated set of guided meditations would probably be a pretty
easy decision for some people.

------
ChikkaChiChi
I would have it start totally zoomed out, then scale inward, Google Earth
style.

The ability to "walk down the street" and use keyboard controls would make
this far more interesting as well.

As it stands, it's a cool implementation, but I wouldn't expect it to catch on
the same way as milliondollarhomepage did.

------
acomjean
for those that don't know.

It was a advertising gimic page. You buy pixels (1$ per) and make anything you
want, they put your link to those pixels.

Don't click. (I clicked "guitars" and got a wrong OS notice, my adobe was out
of date.. ).

[http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com](http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com)

~~~
bt3
What I find interesting is that there's a handful of small pixel chunks on
their that amount to something like "Paid" or "Reserved", so they don't have
valid URLs at all. Feel like those folks missed out on tons of eyeballs a
decade back.

Also wonder if there's any study on ongoing advertising impact on these links.
For example, a number of links on their don't resolve anymore - are those
domains worth anything more than a usual registar price?

------
frankzander
Plz give us you money for nothing in return.

~~~
kawfey
Advertising is not nothing.

~~~
battery_cowboy
It's not, in any way, useful. Advertising is the least productive thing we do
as a species, it's just lying to get people to buy something they don't need
in the first place, because if they needed it, they wouldn't need advertising.

~~~
chrisco255
You've never owned a business and it's telling.

~~~
komali2
What kind of response to this are you hoping for?

~~~
chrisco255
None. Ideally someone would investigate the history of advertising and why it
has become the multi-hundred billion dollar industry that it is. Ideally
someone would investigate with curiosity: why do these businesses spend so
much money on advertising? What benefits do they get from it? Given that it's
such a significant industry, what would the economy look like in a world
without advertising? They might also ask themselves with some degree of
introspection, if they have ever been persuaded to purchase a product or
service on account of some ad and been satisfied with said purchase.

~~~
komali2
It sounds like you aren't open at all to a perspective that challenges the
efficacy of advertising, or is skeptical of the benefits of capitalism in
general.

It sounds like you'd prefer these people don't make their views known in your
presence.

Your comment indicated that you wanted to punish them by making the mistake of
doing so.

------
OptionX
I get the drive for the advertisers, but whats the point for the audience? The
original site had the novel status to gather attention, but for iterations on
the idea what calls the consumer to come and see the ads? Am I missing
something?

~~~
netsharc
Indeed, the original site had many copycats, most of them a 1:1 copy but with
a different name, like the million (British) pound site, or the million cents
one, but none of them had the novelty, which was the thing that got the
original page news coverage and fame...

------
easymovet
best revision of MDHP is [https://satoshis.place/](https://satoshis.place/)
because it replaced the payment rails with lightning for instant gratification
and lets you over wright stuff for a never ending income stream, and paid
responses.

------
quadrature
Still a little skeptical of the layout. but i've already found two cool sites
that i wouldn't have known of before

\- [https://polypane.app/](https://polypane.app/)

\- [https://www.hackerpaper.com/](https://www.hackerpaper.com/)

------
onion2k
The performance on mobile is great. Safe to assume there's some three.js in
there. r3f as well?

~~~
username90
Performance is horrible on desktop though. Chrome renders slowly and edge
doesn't render at all. It is fine for low resolutions, but scale it up to
something like 1440p and it drops to ~6 frames per second. I sit on a desktop
that can run modern games on high settings, I should be getting the full
144fps on this.. When I open the page I notice all 16 cores becomes fully
loaded, so something on the page is cpu bound when it shouldn't have to be.

~~~
lloeki
Perf is just fine here on Safari, MBP with only an i5 + Iris 655. It _does_
gob some 30-50% CPU but it's a solid 60fps.

------
dvt
Very cool idea, love the "neo-Tokyo" vibe. My only issue would be: how do you
deal with some ads being "hidden" behind others (given the isomorphic
perspective)?

~~~
noir_lord
You can rotate and move around with touch controls, works reasonably well on
my current gen iPad mini

~~~
nikisweeting
Rotation isn't working on macOS + Chrome for me.

~~~
chiph
Right-click and drag.

~~~
nikisweeting
Yeah I saw the instructions, it's not rotating for me.

------
echelon
I bought a few ads, and I can see that others have too since this was posted.

If nothing else, this could add some easy exposure for my personal side
project.

I think enough time has passed since "million dollar homepage" that this could
get some modest attention.

It'd be neat if open source projects used a similar monetization scheme.

------
new_here
This is so cool! There’s loads of visual and technical novelty in this concept
reboot for this time. It’s fun to zoom around and see what sort of people are
advertising here. Worked well on my phone too. Hope you enjoy some success
from it, well done!

------
PlainDishonesty
I like the look of it but I don't think it's very pleasant to navigate, this
may change when there are more buildings 'sold'.

It's cool to see a modern take on the original idea. Makes me wonder what
other future ideas could be.

------
noir_lord
Neat but would be cooler if you could fly around it in an air car or
something.

------
mirimir
I carefully avoid WebGL, because it's an over-the-top fingerprinting risk,
even for different VMs on the same host.

So I'll never see this. And indeed, nobody who cares about privacy should ever
risk it. But so it goes.

Edit: I'm not making this up. I actually tested. Multiple Debian family VMs on
a given host have the same WebGL fingerprint. As do multiple Windows 7 VMs,
multiple CentOS VMs, multiple MacOS VMs, etc.

But each group has a different WebGL fingerprint. And the same Debian VM has
different WebGL fingerprints on different hosts. So I'm guessing that reflects
the combination of physical graphics hardware and virtual graphics system.

That's a huge gotcha for people who compartmentalize in multiple VMs.

If someone cares to explain why that's not an issue, I'd love to see it.

------
petters
Works really well on mobile. Loads fast and navigation is easy. Good job!

------
skavi
The lighting is actually quite beautiful as you zoom in.

------
pm_me_ur_fullz
For some reason, this is how I imagined Decentraland

------
butz
If anyone is wondering, yes, ad blocking works on this format too, with a
custom rule. We are ready for future marketing shenanigans!

------
ehonda
Well I just bought an ad. I don't know what the hell I'm thinking doing this.
But I love the idea of the 3D city.

------
goldcd
Well I just bagged billiondollarmetropolis.com - give me a shout if you think
I should quit my job tomrrow.

~~~
goldcd
In all seriousness - I'm an idiot for spending $10 on it, but
milliondollarmetropolis.com _not_ spending that $10...

------
fulldecent2
The sequel already landed. It's here
[https://tenthousandsu.com](https://tenthousandsu.com)

And it uses blockchain. And it actually comes with instructions and customer
support that you can email.

It is a great first crypto asset, since we walk you through it. And it is just
the same gimmickyness as the original.

------
DonHopkins
Just waiting for an ad buster plugin that puts kittens on all the buildings!

------
reggieband
Up next: 3d flappy bird

~~~
OptionX
We both know that 100 of those came out as soon as the original started making
money!

------
desireco42
This is beautiful. I love reimaginings of good ideas or bad, from the past. I
think this is a very innovative way to approach this.

------
pgt
When I click on a building, I can't mousewheel to get out if it. Closed the
tab immediately.

------
DeathArrow
How is this different from buying land on the moon?

------
epa
Beautiful!

------
schaefer
gosh, that's pretty.

------
brailsafe
Cool

------
the_cat_kittles
this, like its predecessor, is a really interesting positive feedback loop. as
more ads are purchased...

\- the creator benefits from more people buying adds by getting money

\- the advertisers benefit by the site's notoriety getting bigger and getting
more visits as a result.

so i would think the rate of ad sales would look like some kind of exponential
curve, so long as the price remains constant and the thing doesn't die off.
does anyone know of any data on the original and how the sales worked? then
again, it could just fill up all at once more or less, if it got everyone's
attention. its kind of like a pyramid scheme that turns in to regular
advertising if it succeeds.

------
mlvljr
A million dollar Dark City :) (y)

