It was 2005. The internet was a different beast. Social media wasn't really a thing yet—Facebook was still "TheFacebook" and locked away in colleges. People actually used Yahoo as a search engine. In this wild-west era of the web, a 21-year-old student from Wiltshire, England, named Alex Tew had a problem. He was about to start a three-year business management course at the University of Nottingham and he was already stressed about student loans. He didn't want to be in debt. Most people just get a part-time job at a pub, but Alex had a weirder idea. He sat in his bedroom, notebook in hand, and asked himself a simple question: How can I make a million dollars?
The answer was the Alex Tew Million Dollar Homepage.
He bought a domain and a basic hosting package for about fifty bucks. The concept was almost stupidly simple. He created a website consisting of a 1000x1000 pixel grid. That is exactly one million pixels. He decided he would sell those pixels for $1 each. You couldn't buy just one, though, because a single pixel is too small to see or click on. You had to buy them in 10x10 blocks. $100 for a tiny square of digital real estate where you could put an image and a link. That’s it. No complicated algorithms. No backend AI. Just a grid, some HTML, and a dream of paying off a student loan.
The Viral Spark That Changed Everything
It didn't start as an overnight explosion. Alex actually began by hounding his friends and family. He managed to convince them to buy the first few hundred pixels. Imagine being his cousin and handing over $100 for a tiny, blurry square on a website no one had heard of. But that $1,000 initial "seed money" was enough to hire a PR firm. Or, more accurately, enough to get a press release out that caught the eye of the BBC and The Guardian.
Once the British tech press picked it up, the thing went nuclear.
The site launched on August 26, 2005. By the end of September, he had cleared $250,000. It was a feedback loop. People bought pixels because the site was getting traffic, and the site got more traffic because people were fascinated by the weirdness of the pixels being bought. It was the first true "viral" business model of the 21st century. Honestly, it was brilliant because it tapped into a very specific psychological itch: FOMO. Advertisers saw the grid filling up and panicked that they were missing out on the biggest billboard in history.
By New Year's Eve, only 1,000 pixels were left.
The Auction and the Million Dollar Milestone
Alex didn't just sell those last 1,000 pixels to the next person in line. He was smarter than that. He put them on eBay. The bidding lasted ten days. In the middle of all this, the site actually got hit by a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Extortionists demanded $5,000 to leave him alone. Alex refused to pay. He spent the week working with security experts to get the site back up while the world watched.
The final bid for the last 1,000 pixels came in at $38,100.
When you add up the previous sales and the auction price, the gross income was $1,037,100. After costs, taxes, and a donation to charity, Alex was a millionaire. He never did finish that degree at Nottingham. He didn't need to. He had just executed the most successful marketing experiment in the history of the young internet.
Why did it work?
- Scarcity: There were only one million pixels. Period. Once they were gone, they were gone.
- The Price Point: $100 for a permanent link on a site getting millions of hits felt like a steal.
- The Narrative: People love an underdog. A student trying to pay for school is a much better story than a corporation trying to sell ad space.
- The Visuals: As the page filled up, it became a chaotic, colorful mosaic. It was digital folk art.
The "Link Rot" Problem: A Graveyard of 2005
If you go to the Alex Tew Million Dollar Homepage today—and yes, it is still live—it’s a bit of a depressing experience. It is a time capsule, but a broken one. Researchers have actually analyzed the site for "link rot." Back in 2017, Harvard researchers found that a huge percentage of the links on the page were dead. By now, nearly half of the websites that paid Alex for a spot on his grid no longer exist.
You’ll see ads for "Cheap Flights," "Online Poker," and "Ten-Cent Ringtones." It feels like walking through an abandoned mall from twenty years ago. You click a link expecting a miracle cure or a weird 2000s blog, and you get a 404 error.
This is actually a significant lesson for digital marketers. Permanent links are rarely permanent. The internet is built on shifting sand. While the Alex Tew Million Dollar Homepage stays the same, the world around it moved on. Some of the companies that bought space, like Panda Software and Ringtones.com, were huge at the time. Others were just individuals who wanted to be part of history.
The Successors and the "Copycat" Curse
Almost immediately, thousands of copycat sites appeared. The Ten Million Dollar Homepage. The Penny Pixel. The Million Euro Homepage. None of them worked. Not a single one.
Why? Because the value wasn't in the pixels. It was in the novelty.
Alex Tew caught lightning in a bottle. You can't catch the same lightning twice by standing in the same spot twenty years later. He understood that the internet rewards the first person to do something weird, not the thousandth person to do something slightly better. It’s the "Purple Cow" theory popularized by Seth Godin. If you see a purple cow, you stop and look. If you see a field of ten thousand purple cows, you keep driving.
What Alex Tew Did Next: From Pixels to Peace
Most people assume Alex was a "one-hit wonder." They think he took his million dollars and disappeared. That couldn't be further from the truth. He actually struggled for a bit, launching a few projects that didn't quite land, like "Pop-Up Millionaire" or "Million Dollar Weight Loss."
But then he pivoted.
In 2012, Alex Tew co-founded an app called Calm.
Yes, that Calm. The meditation app that is now valued at over $2 billion.
It’s a fascinating trajectory. He went from creating the most visually cluttered, chaotic, loud website in history to building an app designed for silence, meditation, and sleep. He traded the "look at me" economy of the Million Dollar Homepage for the "look at yourself" economy of the wellness industry. It shows that he wasn't just a lucky kid with a grid; he was a founder who understood human attention. He knew how to capture it in 2005, and he knows how to soothe it today.
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Technical Realities and Legal Grey Areas
When Alex started, there were no real rules for this. Was he a service provider? Was he selling real estate? He had to draft a "Terms and Conditions" document that basically said he would keep the site online for at least five years. He’s gone far beyond that, keeping it up for two decades.
There were also tax implications. He was a UK citizen selling to a global audience. The paperwork was a nightmare. He often jokes in interviews that he spent a significant portion of his winnings just figuring out how to give the government their cut.
Then there was the security. The 2006 DDoS attack was a massive wake-up call. It showed that even a simple grid of pixels could become a target for international cyber-criminals if there was enough money and hype involved. Alex had to work with the FBI and the UK's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. It was a crash course in cybersecurity that most 21-year-olds never get.
The Long-Term Impact on Digital Advertising
Before the Alex Tew Million Dollar Homepage, online advertising was mostly banners and pop-ups. Alex proved that you could sell "identity" and "legacy" rather than just clicks. He wasn't selling a click-through rate (CTR); he was selling a piece of history.
Many modern NFT (Non-Fungible Token) projects owe a debt to Alex Tew. The idea of owning a specific "spot" on a digital canvas is the direct ancestor of CryptoPunks or the Bored Ape Yacht Club. He gamified digital ownership before blockchain was even a whitepaper.
Misconceptions You Should Stop Believing
A lot of people think Alex is still making money from the site. He isn't. The site is frozen. He doesn't sell new pixels. He doesn't take subscriptions. It’s a static image file with an image map. Another myth is that he "scammed" people. Honestly, if you bought a $100 link in 2005 and got millions of hits for a year, you got a better Return on Investment (ROI) than almost any Google Ad campaign in history. The buyers knew exactly what they were getting: a gamble on a viral moment.
Actionable Takeaways for Entrepreneurs Today
If you're looking at the story of the Million Dollar Homepage and wondering how to apply it to the modern world, don't try to sell pixels. That ship sailed, hit an iceberg, and sank twenty years ago. Instead, look at the underlying principles Alex used to win.
1. Focus on the Story, Not the Product
Nobody cared about the pixels. They cared about the student trying to pay for his education. If you are launching something, what is the human narrative behind it? People buy from people.
2. Scarcity is a Tool, Use It
The internet is a place of infinite abundance. That makes everything feel cheap. By creating a hard limit (one million pixels), Alex created value. Whether it’s a limited-time offer or a capped number of users, find a way to make your product finite.
3. Move When the Wind Blows
Alex didn't spend ten years trying to make "Million Dollar Homepage 2." He saw the world changing and moved into the wellness space with Calm. Don't be married to your first big idea. Be married to the process of solving problems.
4. Viral is a Strategy, Not an Accident
Alex didn't just "go viral." He proactively reached out to the press. He spent money on PR. He treated his "joke" like a serious business from day one. You have to give the internet a reason to talk about you.
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The Million Dollar Homepage is a reminder that the simplest ideas are often the best, provided they are executed at the perfect moment in time. It represents the optimism of the early web—a place where anyone with a laptop and a hundred bucks could become a millionaire by being a little bit weird.
Next Steps for Researching This Topic
To truly understand the legacy of this project, you should examine the original site's source code using "Inspect Element" to see the primitive way image maps were used to create links. You can also use the Wayback Machine to track the site's evolution from August 2005 through the eBay auction in early 2006. For a deeper look at the business side, read the 2016 retrospective interviews with Alex Tew in The Financial Times or The Guardian, where he discusses the transition from a viral sensation to the CEO of a multi-billion dollar unicorn like Calm.