Million Dollar Homepage

I'm intrigued by the concept of the Million Dollar Homepage, and by how many companies bought into this. Because it is mainly companies, or organisations, that have spent the money to buy pixels on this homepage.

Looking through the list of buyers, I was excited to find some real names in there - until I realised that these real names belonged to people working for companies who were just trying to raise their profile.

This homepage sort of shows how extremely effective internet memes are - "There's this website that everyone is going to look at because it's a gimmick!" "Wow, what a way to get exposure!"

And get exposure they did - because the pixels are still up there, these companies are still getting advertising years after the "experiment" began. Sure, most of the links are now defunct, but it's still basically free advertising - especially when you realize that for $1 a pixel, these organisations bought ad space for FIVE years, on a website that people will still go to look at in interest.

It's rather ingenious, and it's also rather unfortunate that it's not really the sort of thing that can be succesfully redone. Maybe because people are a bit more desensitized to advertising online now? Or maybe because everyone (companies included) would just view another attempt as merely an imitation? And in our hyper mediated environment everybody would rather be "real" over "fake".

At least the creator of the page was brutally honest -this money wasn't going to charity, this money was going to cushion his university experience.

It's scary just how far companies will go just to get some focus on themselves. The internet seems to just make this condition so much worse. But it's not just companies that do this - countries do as well, as evidenced by the bidding war that goes on every four years to try and win the right to host the Olympics - or rather, the right to spend exorbitant amounts of money all for a weeks worth of events. And why? Because the Olympics, like this Million Dollar Homepage, is a sort of brand in itself that companies/countries want to buy into.