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Alex Tew is a 21 year old student from Cricklade, England. You've probably heard his amazing story, and about how he invented the genius idea of the million dollar homepage. Like most successes, he's idea was simple. Setup a website - divide it up into blocks of 10 x 10 pixel blocks and allow users to buy a small advert on your page. The million dollar home page became a runaway success, generated many hours of news coverage and best of all with Alex selling each pixel at $1 made himself $1 million dollars within the course of a few weeks.
It really was an overnight success story.
Joel Comm, the internet marketer best known for his adsense expertise has recently launched a similar site. Called 500 words, the page contains words which users can purchase as links to their site. Each time the page is reloaded, the words are scattered randonly though out the page, so there rarely in the same position. Joels site was also a great success and with the publicity both sites generated anyone purchasing a pixel block or word in the original site will have fully recovered there investment with the traffic they'll receive.
Both sites have an alexa ranking of under 16,000 (alexa ranks all websites on the amount of traffic they receive. the lower the number the more traffic that is received) & the milliondollarhomepage has a google pagerank of 6.
And then, as predicted the clones were developed. The scripts and ideas were copied & you can pick up a cheap milliondollar script for around $50 or even a free 500 words script.
Unfortunately, this is where the success ends. Because the concept has gone from a unique novel idea, to mass produced script where every webmaster is trying to sell their words and pixels. You've literally got thousands of sites selling the same idea - and rarely will they be a success. I've just visited ten pixel sites and every single one has only sold a handful of pixels - some at just a penny each. Some are completely blank selling zero pixels.
The idea was great - but the lifespan was short. People are now bored of the idea & will quickly leave any site they encounter.
So, whatever your idea for your website, ask yourself what lifespan will it have?
If it's going to be based on a short lived concept, then sadly you'll have to expect a short term failure. However, if you site is based around a proven long term concept, such as eBay or dropshipping - something that won't have the novelty worn off within a few months you'll be likely to have better success.
Article by Mark Kenny
Trading-Web-Solutions
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