My Little MillionDollarHomepage Garden

[hoofhearted]

How many people here didn’t realize that the dude who created the million dollar homepage went on to create the Calm app many years later?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Tew

[altdataseller]

I only realized it when I curiously went to billiondollarhomepage.com and it got redirected to calm.com

[irtefa]

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?

[HeckFeck]

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

From IRT we have why use CSS, in case anyone still needs convinced: https://irt.org/articles/js135/

[matthieucan]

My favourite is http://perdu.com, from 1998. I've been using it with ping when testing internet connectivity for years

[ThinkingGuy]

I used to check ITHell every day, the same way I read HN now. Then around 2001 it just sort of died, and has been frozen in time ever since.

http://ithell.com/

[mhb]

https://zombo.com/

[Borg3]

You like archeology? Ok, have fun here...

http://borg.uu3.net/ldetweil/

[greyKnight]

Take a look at the page source. Unfortunately they stopped updating their Twitter (X) in 2013. https://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

[samsquire]

There's a nostalgia about the old web, where things were uplifting, good and positive.

[nojs]

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?

[petercooper]

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.

[bookofjoe]

I know exactly why. Back in the heyday of blogs, around 2010, I was SO fired up every day thinking today would be the day I'd strike it rich.

I placed a very small ad featuring my blog's URL in the back pages of The New Yorker: it cost $500 or so.

I figured you never know who might see it and visit.

For perspective: at peak popularity back then I got about 10,000 visitors/15,000 page views DAILY.

Nowadays I get an average of 500 page views daily.

[giarc]

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.

[SkyMarshal]

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.

[runjake]

Because it was a major viral phenomenon back then and people liked to go look at it and see what they could find within.

[weinzierl]

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.

EDIT: Or was it 75pixels.net? I seem to own both.

[matthieucan]

Did you explore archives of the original website?

[higgins]

Here’s another (newer) one inspired by the great:

https://24HourHomepage.com

[netsharc]

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."

[1] (864+1) x 864 / 2

[tiborsaas]

It was quite trippy to watch the slideshow with a 120BPM house track :)

[loveparade]

Please don't spam your own projects.

[conradfr]

Come to think of it, MillionDollarHomepage could have offered "pixels owners" of dead businesses to resell their space while taking a cut.

[mchannon]

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.

[matthieucan]

True, but it's also nice to be able to see the unaltered billboard from back then!

[thomas8787]

Brings back memories. I bought a copycat domain name in those days. A couple of months later someone reached out and bought it for like $100 IIRC.

[xyst]

The original internet billboard. I remember trying to replicate this when I was a kid on some static web host (geocities?)

[PurpleRamen]

Don't tell this reddit. Spez might bring back r/places with a twist..

[schlauerfox]

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/

[waingake]

https://thelist.best/ please, thanks

[paulpauper]

million dollar homepages were sorta like something in-between beanie baby hype and crypto hype.

[Vxbrown]

Commenting for ideas.

What to do with that url?