I love this kind of internet archaeology. It's crazy to think how many sites like this have just been sitting untouched for years. What else is out there?
May I present Well Made Web, a gallery of inventive and distinguished websites: https://wmw.thran.uk
One example is Internet Related Technologies which was reporting on new web standards during 1998-2001, last updated in 2001 and still online for all that time: https://wmw.thran.uk/dowdy/2.html#irt
> John Labovitz's e-zine-list - very well maintained, comprehensive list of cyberspatial "zines". Zines are the killer app of cyberspace, like the bible was for Gutenberg.
I’m really curious what the original owner of the domain thought the value of spending $200 on that little ad was. Like nobody is going to see it in the sea of other ads, and backlinks weren’t a thing then. Why else would you buy it?
I was involved in one of the logos on the MHP. It's not a very interesting story, but I'll share it anyway!
Being permanently online, I saw MDH quite early on and when it began to get some initial press mentions, I figured it might go big. I hit up a friend/client of mine - Ben Neumann (RIP) - who was CEO of Globat, a hosting company. He was hugely into guerilla marketing techniques (like paying a guy to have their logo as a tattoo or sneaking a Saddam Hussein themed ad into a popular computer magazine - a story in itself) so this was totally up his street and he immediately bought the large space now marked "FREE HOSTING" in the top middle.
At the time, Globat used to pay quite juicy commissions to folks for hosting referrals (equivalent to about the whole first year of hosting fees) so even if he ended up with 50 signups from it, it would have broken even.
So this discussion started me thinking about trying again, a simple classified ad like the one I placed in 2010, with just my blog's URL. Perhaps adding a QR code so peeps could easily have a look at my site with their phones.
I checked to see how much such an ad would cost:
>A simple 1-inch black-and-white classified style ad costs $6,066.
The Million Dollar Homepage was a big deal back then. I remember seeing it on the news a bunch. It likely got a ton of traffic and every website was trying to capitalize on the hype.
I used to work in the same group as the company in the top left, Cartridge Save. I think the million dollar home page got them quite a few clicks, but when confronted with all those ads it's hard to pick anything out even if it's prominent.
It’s not necessarily true that nobody would see your ad, part of the novelty was just mousing over little square to see what was there. This was also in the early days of the web when such things actually were novel.
I had the same idea and ended up
with 75pixels.com, but never did anything with it. Not really surprising that it is similar given that probably many domains there had "pixel" in it and probably we both tried to get an innocuous one.
Yes, I explored it on DomainTools and to say it doesn't have a completely pristine past is a bit of an understatement, but I think it is hardly possible to find a clean one that at the same time is not trademark risk either.
So, why does each second have a photo/link instead of most of them being empty other than for 925 of them?
Good luck with the get $373,680 [1] richer scheme..
Edit: aha, uploading and overwriting someone's content is free, to have an overwrite-lock one has to pay for it... Well I guess you were expecting a gold rush, but with so little uptake people seem to be thinking "why worry, chances are my link won't get overridden, and if it does happen I can just overwrite someone else's."
I think the problem is that while this project has its own twist and not a 1-to-1 clone of the MDHP, ultimately it's not some new or really interesting idea but rather just an attempt to make some money for the author.
The business needn't be dead, and in fact the "lessee" could resell it at a higher price. The ORIGINAL NFT.
But most lessee dead businesses would eventually lose track of their credentials, and in fact many of the people simply lost interest or even up and died. A system whereby a dead link or a parking page results in "property tax auctions" would have kept the ecosystem healthier by moving out the dead wood.
Milliondollarapp (yes, I'm plugging a personal project, but for the sake of discussion) includes both of these approaches. Unfortunately it's been 90% complete for 7 years, and could really use a collaborator or someone with a more photogenic backstory to market it.
What made Milliondollarhomepage a sensation was its founder was trying to raise money to go to university, and that soft spot helped him sell out in about a month. He caught lightning in a bottle and good on him, even if he never ended up going to university for that purpose.
They already did that to distract from the ongoing API changes issues, away from april fools season. Not sure if it worked, the moderator issue seems to be back page news now that the people have either left or moved on leaving just a sort of netsplit to kbin and lemmy.
https://redditmigration.com/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Tew