This topic seems to be stirring up a lot of emotion on a couple forums I frequent. Pixelotto is the successor to the Million Dollar Homepage, the “pixel advertising” success of Alex Tew which attracted huge media attention and over a million dollars in advertising sales. The idea is simple – the site consists mainly of a large grid image which advertisers pay to add their graphics to. The cost of the ad is set by how many pixels the image will occupy on the grid.
Knowing that the original Million Dollar Homepage received very high volumes of traffic as a result of the media attention and word-of-mouth around its success, and that Pixelotto had taken over $100,000 in sales during its first week, I went ahead and purchased a block of my own. I made the minimum purchase of $200 and chose the location on the grid I thought most likely to result in clicks (just off center from the portion of the page visible immediately upon loading, and using a neon green color to attract attention).
For most companies buying an ad on a site like this would be throwing away money. There is only value as long as the site receives high traffic, which would be a few months at best, and most of the clicks would be the result of curious advertisers or contest participants not interested in the actual sites being advertised.
However, this site reaches one of my target markets quite well – the new webmaster, specifically the new webmaster that can’t afford the $200 ad buy for this site. They find the site through blogs, forums and media, visit it, click some of the ads, want to buy one for themselves but can’t justify the spend on their fledgling sites that haven’t earned significant income. If they happen to click my ad, however, I offer website advertising starting at $1.95, a much easier price to handle.
Here are some stats to show the recent click and sale counts resulting from the Pixelotto ad, as tracked by AdWatcher:
I fully expect a positive ROI on this campaign. A handful of medium size orders will cover the immediate cost of the ad and some percentage may even join my growing group of long-term repeat customers.
So, given I’m making actual sales from this ad, why all the negative sentiment towards Pixelotto on public forums?
- Alex claimed the first Million Dollar Homepage was an effort to raise money to pay for his college education. After the site became a success, he dropped out of college claiming there was nothing he could learn.
- MDH spawned thousands of copycats that use less than ethical measures to attract advertisers (such as filling part of their grid with fake ads to appear popular), without having the actual traffic base to bring value to their advertisers.
- The feeling that Alex is undeserving of the money, especially at twice the cost of the original site without the college fund excuse as before.
I think Alex will come to regret dropping out of college over a single successful website without a sustainable business model. As it appears Pixelotto ad sales have dropped off less than 10% towards the target amount, he may soon find that building these sites is not a profession after all. Regardless, I’ll get what I can out of it while the hype lasts.
Note: Statistics screenshot last updated 1/22/2007
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