Digg and The Million Dollar Homepage

On Friday, Aug 26, 2005, a teenager named Alex Tew came up an idea – to try and make $1m (US) by selling 1,000,000 pixels for $1 each – and made it happen. By January 2006 Alex sold the last pixels on www.milliondollarhomepage.com, and was a million dollars richer. It only took him five months to reach his goal. Simply outstanding.

I have no intentions to ever make a million dollars from this site. My goal is simply to go on outrageously fun adventures led by you, and let people live those adventures through this website. But even though I am not planning on making a million dollars, there is still a lot I can learn from the success of Alex’s website.

I looked through his blog and tried to pinpoint the key contributing factors to his tremendous success:

1. His idea had never been done before

2. It was a product that provided benefits to its users

3. The world’s media loved his story and it spread like wildfire at a very low cost to him.

By September, his plans were in motion. People were buying pixels, and orders were piling up in his inbox. On September 9th, a popular website called digg further catapulted him into the mainstream. Interest in his website grew exponentially, and he couldn’t be stopped.

Digg is a fantastic Web2.0 site where users submit stories and vote on them. Popular stories get featured on the main page, and sites can receive thousands of hits. If you are not a member and are at all interested in Internet Technology, I strongly suggest checking out the page.

If you are a member, I am going to ask you a big favor: please please please digg this article [link]. It could literally increase traffic to this website ten-fold over night, and I would be eternally grateful.

I’ve taken most of the suggestions for Friday’s Birthday Hat and Drink suggestions, and compiled them into a survey. At 5:00 PM PST the survey will end, I am going to do my best to make or buy that birthday hat, and head over to the liquor store. Thank you for participating! It’s going to be a lot of fun.

[survey_fly]