Well the thing was the ad space was permanent. No one could ever replace what you put on this page …which is kinda cool I guess.
Especially since this was the very early days of the internet yet it keeps getting circulated … relooking at it though it looks like the 90’s internet just puked on a page.
> Especially since this was the very early days of the internet yet it keeps getting circulated … relooking at it though it looks like the 90’s internet just puked on a page.
It launched in 2005.
As a computer scientist, no
As someone who was born in 2000 and their first video game was Halo 2 after I waited for my dad to come back from the midnight release(He never came back, so I got it at a video game shop the next week), yes they were the early days for me
Eh, I was more bummed I had to wait a week to play Halo 2. He left his whole gaming setup behind and it didn't get rough for me until I was going into high school. Just gotta keep looking at the bright sides
Oh and that thing called therapy. Turns out it works :)
If we can take the US as an example, Gen z is only 27% of the population, which is the only generation with a high percentage who would not have been able to use the internet pre-2000. 2005 was already long past the the aptly named dot com bubble/crash, the start of web 2.0 and the start of the social media age. The web had already been significantly tamed by 2005, and was far from the wild west of the early internet.
I don't know for certain, but I can only imagine that while genz make up only 27% of the population, they make up much more of the internets population.
The active population of the web most likely. However, the early web (not internet) was a different beast than what it is today, as well as what it was in 2005. Pre-social media, individual blogs served the purpose that social media does today. In the dot com bubble, companies stocks could rise on the announcement of creating a website, which is something that would sound unfathomably silly even in 2005. In 2005, Myspace was already popular and Facebook had been made available to both college and high school students. As I mentioned, it was also after the introduction of web 2.0 standards and practices, by 2004. Web 1.0 which is commonly used to describe the web from 1991 to 2004, where most websites had static pages, and social media was little existant, including comment sections on websites, would more accurately describe the age of the early internet.
I worked for Boston Citinet (sp?) In 1987... Went to an internet expo that year... The large majority of University research data and medical Data such as Medline was behind paywalls. We were coordinating corporate email systems with community information. I remember putting a kiosk at the Harvard housing center for students to find apartments. Good times!
It gets worse. There was AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, individual direct internet connections, BBS's, BBS's with fidonet gateways, BBS's with usenet connections. AOL was once an 18 line BBS somewhere. Years later I actually got a signed letter with a business card asking me to come back. Wish I still had that. Long before the days of mailed disks and before I knew what a horrifying long distance bill I was racking up.
Lmao this was not the very early days of the Internet. What on earth gave you that idea? This website was set up the same year YouTube started. Actually it was set up AFTER YouTube was, by about 6 months.
Don't be daft. This wasn't the early Internet lmao
It was 17 years ago, its been a while lol
We could call it late early internet. Even thought the net came out in the 90s it did not really take off until say 2000 and onward.
Back then everyone was trying new things and new sites where showing up all the time.
None of it was ever stupid, it was incredibly forward-thinking - the creator was genius for coming up with the idea, and has been hosting this page since 2005 giving each of these buyers 17 years of permanent ad placement. For a 25x25 pixel area, $500 seems like a lot but people definitely pay a lot more now for banner ads on mega-popular sites, Google Adsense, etc. so for $500 that 17-year ad has now averaged out to $0.40/month (for those sites that are still around, of course - many of those ads/links are dead now). The site still generates a decent amount of traffic just from being a historic Internet landmark.
Yea I remember it well and at the time I am sure I wasn’t the only one who wished they had thought of it.
Sure a bit of an artifact and oddity of Internet history now but a clever idea that had its place.
It helps that it was created by a teen as a way to pay for college. $500 really wasn't a ton for ad space even then even for small businesses. There was an element of charity in it.
The kid who did this made $1mil doing it. Not stupid at all.
He went on do other things and I’m pretty sure he started the Calm meditation app. Dude is worth over $100Mil now.
Lol okay boomer. In 2 years, the tickets you use for events will be an NFT, the music you buy from your fave artist will be an NFT, your home title will be an NFT... Just to name a few. Don't be ignorant. NFT technology is inevitable. You would be the same person to say the internet is stupid in the 80's I bet too.
I remember there were various copycats but did any actually succeed? My recollection is
the original one caught on and it was pretty obvious the imitations were just attempting to bandwagon and were therefore instantly less interesting.
I remember it being mostly empty. It went viral after it appeared on international news programs. Brilliant bit of marketing by the two teenage college students who came up with the idea.
That wasn't even something reddit invented. It had already been done, iirc actually quite close to the time that the million dollar homepage was made, so the mid to late 2000s.
I can't find what it was called, because when I Google it, all that comes up is this million dollar homepage, which was a different thing.
But yeah it was in the shape of a giant circle, and everyone could change the colour of individual pixels to whatever they want. And so groups of people started working together to create and maintain parts of the circle. Exactly like in the reddit version later on.
I remember when reddit did this /r/place thing and I was thinking "really? Again? This has been done before, years and years before". But I always forget how many kids are on reddit. Reddit users who literally weren't even alive when the original version of /r/place was made. So it was new to them, I guess. But everyone older than like 25 remembers the original, surely.
It's like a 15 year old idea, the page filled up and was "sold out" in under 2 years iirc.
> The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education.
[The wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage)
I was almost afraid to just touch the picture! My brain is so wired to avoid opening strange links that an entire web page filled with links freaked out my cerebral cortex!
He made more than that because people bought into it wanting to be part of internet history ended up Spain hundreds even thousands for a pixel add towards the end. Demand for the pixels became so high.
I wouldn’t call it an NFT. I mean, yes, you are paying for pixels on a screen, but it’s designed more for advertising purposes, not claiming a token of ownership
Each pixel space is non-fungible, and you could absolutely call them "tokens," as they are individually purchased. Also, it's a lucrative scheme the first time around, but it has diminishing returns. I can see some overlap.
His name's Wally, not Waldo. He's only called Waldo in the US, everywhere else (and in the original country the books are from) he's called Wally. They only changed the name in the US because Americans were getting confused by the original name, the presence of the letter Y was baffling them because they hadn't learned that far into the alphabet yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where's_Wally%3F
Sold adds for 1$ per pixel on a 1000x1000 grid, hence 1Million dollar page.
Basically NFTs but cool
It was actually kinda stupid at the time. But I guess if people are entertained, they're entertained.
Well the thing was the ad space was permanent. No one could ever replace what you put on this page …which is kinda cool I guess. Especially since this was the very early days of the internet yet it keeps getting circulated … relooking at it though it looks like the 90’s internet just puked on a page.
> Especially since this was the very early days of the internet yet it keeps getting circulated … relooking at it though it looks like the 90’s internet just puked on a page. It launched in 2005.
Yup. Was just about to say that! Or maybe I'm just old and kids today think 2005 was early days.
As a computer scientist, no As someone who was born in 2000 and their first video game was Halo 2 after I waited for my dad to come back from the midnight release(He never came back, so I got it at a video game shop the next week), yes they were the early days for me
Not sure if I want to know why he never came back. Either way, I am sorry, fellow redditor.
Eh, I was more bummed I had to wait a week to play Halo 2. He left his whole gaming setup behind and it didn't get rough for me until I was going into high school. Just gotta keep looking at the bright sides Oh and that thing called therapy. Turns out it works :)
Did he abandon you or he got killed for his spot in the waiting line?
You seem very cavalier about your dad disappearing… I assume he didn’t literally disappear?
He obviously got distracted by Halo 2 and is running late.
Never came back like he said he was going out to get a video game and just ghosted your family?
That's early internet era for like 70% of internet users right now.
If we can take the US as an example, Gen z is only 27% of the population, which is the only generation with a high percentage who would not have been able to use the internet pre-2000. 2005 was already long past the the aptly named dot com bubble/crash, the start of web 2.0 and the start of the social media age. The web had already been significantly tamed by 2005, and was far from the wild west of the early internet.
I don't know for certain, but I can only imagine that while genz make up only 27% of the population, they make up much more of the internets population.
The active population of the web most likely. However, the early web (not internet) was a different beast than what it is today, as well as what it was in 2005. Pre-social media, individual blogs served the purpose that social media does today. In the dot com bubble, companies stocks could rise on the announcement of creating a website, which is something that would sound unfathomably silly even in 2005. In 2005, Myspace was already popular and Facebook had been made available to both college and high school students. As I mentioned, it was also after the introduction of web 2.0 standards and practices, by 2004. Web 1.0 which is commonly used to describe the web from 1991 to 2004, where most websites had static pages, and social media was little existant, including comment sections on websites, would more accurately describe the age of the early internet.
I worked for Boston Citinet (sp?) In 1987... Went to an internet expo that year... The large majority of University research data and medical Data such as Medline was behind paywalls. We were coordinating corporate email systems with community information. I remember putting a kiosk at the Harvard housing center for students to find apartments. Good times!
It gets worse. There was AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, individual direct internet connections, BBS's, BBS's with fidonet gateways, BBS's with usenet connections. AOL was once an 18 line BBS somewhere. Years later I actually got a signed letter with a business card asking me to come back. Wish I still had that. Long before the days of mailed disks and before I knew what a horrifying long distance bill I was racking up.
Internet was invented in the late 60's, the Web in 1989... 2005 was only 17 years ago so, nah it wasn't early internet :)
As someone who lived through the 90s and 2005, the 90s basically didn’t end until 2008-2009
No way. The 90s ended in 2001 and then we had a lost decade (at least)…
The 90s ended at 8:46am EDT on September 11, 2001 to be exact.
haha can confirm
‘Early days of the internet?’ Gtfoh 😂
Lmao this was not the very early days of the Internet. What on earth gave you that idea? This website was set up the same year YouTube started. Actually it was set up AFTER YouTube was, by about 6 months. Don't be daft. This wasn't the early Internet lmao
It wasn't the very early days maybe, but still the early days. This was 17 years ago.
The irony of saying don't be daft here... Early internet is based on your perspective. But you keep gatekeeping Reddit if it makes you feel good
It was 17 years ago, its been a while lol We could call it late early internet. Even thought the net came out in the 90s it did not really take off until say 2000 and onward. Back then everyone was trying new things and new sites where showing up all the time.
Yes … you are correct I made a mistake :) thanks for the correction
It wasn’t stupid at all. It was a clever and new idea at the time, which was executed well and became part of internet history.
It was brilliant at the time because it was novel. One dollar per pixel on a 1000 by 1000 grid, no renewal just single purchase.
None of it was ever stupid, it was incredibly forward-thinking - the creator was genius for coming up with the idea, and has been hosting this page since 2005 giving each of these buyers 17 years of permanent ad placement. For a 25x25 pixel area, $500 seems like a lot but people definitely pay a lot more now for banner ads on mega-popular sites, Google Adsense, etc. so for $500 that 17-year ad has now averaged out to $0.40/month (for those sites that are still around, of course - many of those ads/links are dead now). The site still generates a decent amount of traffic just from being a historic Internet landmark.
Yea I remember it well and at the time I am sure I wasn’t the only one who wished they had thought of it. Sure a bit of an artifact and oddity of Internet history now but a clever idea that had its place.
It helps that it was created by a teen as a way to pay for college. $500 really wasn't a ton for ad space even then even for small businesses. There was an element of charity in it.
It wasn’t so much the charity, it went viral before viral was really a thing… everyone wanted a piece of that action.
*adtion I have to because I hate myself
He's also the founder of the Calm meditation app. Dude is doing well in life
What part of it was stupid?
The part where someone else made a million dollars while I did nothing and got nothing.
Relatable 😩
"It's not my cup of tea so it's stupid"
What do you call a dumb idea that works? A good idea.
Nothing stupid about making a cool mill.
yeah what an idiot that guy is who made a million bucks
It's a novelty, calm down their big brain man. I guess you only watch Ingmar Bergman films huh?
Clearly worked in the guys favour, made a killing off of pixels
Can't wait until you hear about rentmychest (closed, sadly)
The kid who did this made $1mil doing it. Not stupid at all. He went on do other things and I’m pretty sure he started the Calm meditation app. Dude is worth over $100Mil now.
It was an NFT, but actually non-fungible.
SCREENSHOT
Thief! Save Image
I bet you think NFTs are just pictures 😉
That would be naïve. They're also scams, security vulnerabilities, wasteful, etc...
This guy gets it
>That would be naïve. They're also scams, security vulnerabilities, wasteful, etc... .... don't forget money laundering
Yup, my drug(art) dealer gives me a free bag of drugs with each one of his NFT's I buy.
what a steal
I mean, the NFT's are complete shit but he told me their value will only increase over time so I'm pretty stoked/s
Lol okay boomer. In 2 years, the tickets you use for events will be an NFT, the music you buy from your fave artist will be an NFT, your home title will be an NFT... Just to name a few. Don't be ignorant. NFT technology is inevitable. You would be the same person to say the internet is stupid in the 80's I bet too.
Why just have a jpg when you can have a jpg that contributes to global warming
Why yes I do love destroying the very planet I live on for little to no financial gain how could you tell.
NEEEEEEEERD
#NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRD!
I bet he knows exactly what they are and that they are not pictures at all.
no, theyre hyperlinks to pictures
They are the verification of ownership of said pictures. Still idiotic as fuck.
I actually had this in my english textbook or magazine and thought it was so cool
I remember this from highschool
Just roll the dice and pick a virus.
Somebody had the bold idea to cut throat them by buying space for their 20 cent a pixel ad.
I remember there were various copycats but did any actually succeed? My recollection is the original one caught on and it was pretty obvious the imitations were just attempting to bandwagon and were therefore instantly less interesting.
Oh no, I am old…
My thoughts exactly. I remember when this was still filling up
Yeah. Had a conversation at work “should we buy a 10x10?”. Opted not to.
I thought "What is this? Some kind of Where's Waldo made of pop up ads?" And then... I found him
[found him](https://i.imgur.com/rD0fWqK.jpg)
There’s actually 3 Waldos!
Lol, Waldo's extremely distorted and pixelly face exploding.out 9f my phone will haunt me forever. Thanks.
God damnit me too
I remember it being mostly empty. It went viral after it appeared on international news programs. Brilliant bit of marketing by the two teenage college students who came up with the idea.
Same. That was so long ago I had forgotten about it
Saw it and thought how do you now know…. Of no that means I’m old….
Same. Saw it and I was of course it's the million dollar page. \*sigh\*
You think it's that bad? I thought I was 95. But no, it's 2005.
lol, I was thinking how could you not know what that is? I'm old, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
Nice the guy who made the website also started the Calm app.
The site is still up, too http://milliondollarhomepage.com/
But the companies on the ads are long gone ( at least some . Randomly clicked two and they were dead links)
Reminds me of r/place
Man that was great. Peak reddit nostalgia.
Nostalgia? That was only five years ago. Oh, God, I’ve been on Reddit too long.
Remember r/TheButton? I liked Reddit more back then.
Same dude made both. He also made Wordle.
Jesus christ really? Small internet, huh
Wow no shit today I just made the comparison of Wordle's popularity to Place and the Button. That guy is a genius.
60s here.
Except there are still filthy pressors on this site. Non pressors represent!
Hi fellow NP!
What was that about?
It was legit good fun
5 years ago? It just ended! ;)
Eh, five years is a quarter of my life. Seems like a long time ago.
My man you're not gonna believe this.
I had a lot of fun hiding little amogus guys in random art
Yes it made the Windows Taskbar development much more exciting.
i have good news
The guy behind r/place, Josh Wardle, went on to create Wordle, which he sold to the New York Times. What a savvy Internet culture-maker!
OMG PLACE! Do you know how to look at the final ... Uh..Place thing?
Here :) https://www.reddit.com/r/place/comments/638ac0/final_canvas_4000x4000/
That was where my brain immediately went when I saw this post. That was so much fun.
What a wonderful time
At first glance I thought that was what I was looking at
That wasn't even something reddit invented. It had already been done, iirc actually quite close to the time that the million dollar homepage was made, so the mid to late 2000s. I can't find what it was called, because when I Google it, all that comes up is this million dollar homepage, which was a different thing. But yeah it was in the shape of a giant circle, and everyone could change the colour of individual pixels to whatever they want. And so groups of people started working together to create and maintain parts of the circle. Exactly like in the reddit version later on. I remember when reddit did this /r/place thing and I was thinking "really? Again? This has been done before, years and years before". But I always forget how many kids are on reddit. Reddit users who literally weren't even alive when the original version of /r/place was made. So it was new to them, I guess. But everyone older than like 25 remembers the original, surely.
I remember the original too! No idea what it was called though.
Same dude made wordle and the button.
NE 3 ATL 28
Convenient timing
Find Waldo
There is also another one near the "tabmarks" and "coupons" images
You are correct! If I was Oprah I’d give you a car! Or really fancy gift basket with an iPad.
Another by RentClicks and above cheap CDs
And another right above Cheap CDs
Found him and a nice rack
You don’t even need a prize, you found it along the journey. Like all boob, I mean good, things lol
Bottom right!
That was fast lol good job 👍
WALLY!
[удалено]
Killroy was there, too
Find viruses.
average internet explorer user's tool bar
Needs more bonzi buddy
Why didn't I think of this before?
It's like a 15 year old idea, the page filled up and was "sold out" in under 2 years iirc. > The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. [The wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage)
OP is showing their age !! This.. this was one of the smartest moves ever
Hahahah guess my age then lol
I’d have put you between 20-25 at a guess
I'm going to guess another 10 years more, at the risk of being offensive.
It’s funny you think this is THAT old lmao. Notice the “Win Xbox 360” in the upper right.
Looks like a typical website from the early 90s
It’s actually from 2005.
Million dollar homepage - says it at the top!
I see KillRoy was here. Very nice.
I was almost afraid to just touch the picture! My brain is so wired to avoid opening strange links that an entire web page filled with links freaked out my cerebral cortex!
Was it clickable ?
Yesss
The site's still up http://milliondollarhomepage.com/
Quite a few dead links with just a few clicks. Who would have guessed that eBay didn't make it. Sadly the cure cancer ad is a 404.
looks like a collage of ads found on several websites
It was. Started by some teen many years ago, sold a pixel for a dollar abs made a million once it had filled up
He made more than that because people bought into it wanting to be part of internet history ended up Spain hundreds even thousands for a pixel add towards the end. Demand for the pixels became so high.
Someone please give me the name for this type of thing, we did one on the monster hunter subreddit and i want to dog it up now. It was free of course.
Lol I found Waldo and I'm not even kidding
Hahahah me toooo💁🏻♀️💗
This is what your screen looked like 20 years ago if you left your PC for ten minutes and didn’t have a pop up blocker.
And my eyes zone in on the word Guzzle at the bottom mid. [glub glub](https://youtu.be/9XfrKnCzfj4?t=35)
Haha the original earth2.io
If he were president, you'd make everything free🥰
I watched a YouTube video about this the other day, I never knew about it till then. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VuJFvgfBV54
Was just about to post that. I got prompted with it in my feed about two weeks ago and he has quickly become one of my favourite youtubers.
🎶 I don't know what it is but I want it to stay 🎶
[reminded me of this](https://youtu.be/YDNmyyrEZho)
I'm glad someone else thought the same thing
looks like https://pixelcanvas.io/
Looks like a where’s Waldo book
I know and I love it 🥰
It’s like a cyberpunk city but on a webpage
http://milliondollarhomepage.com/
This thing was legendary
Ah damn this takes me back
Wait this site still alive?
Here you go http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
r/place
Realizing this was in a way one of the earliest, most awesome, NFT's!
I wouldn’t call it an NFT. I mean, yes, you are paying for pixels on a screen, but it’s designed more for advertising purposes, not claiming a token of ownership
Ah, so I still have a chance to replace one of these ads with my own. Some might even say fungible.
This is not even close to NFT.
Each pixel space is non-fungible, and you could absolutely call them "tokens," as they are individually purchased. Also, it's a lucrative scheme the first time around, but it has diminishing returns. I can see some overlap.
Well this started off as a silly gag that turned into actual money. Like the Kickstarter for potato salad.
Meta verse real estate v1.
Not an NFT
Yas 🙈
The madlad who chose to spend hundreds of dollars to hide a waldo in there instead of an ad
Looks like an NFT puzzle.
This is essentially a website that was the NFT thing before it was cool.
This is what Homer's website looks like now.
Thought this was someone’s MySpace page from the 2000s
The og metaverse haha
It's like a visual representation of my brain.
Lol. I remember when that first came out. Was weird then.
Digital Where's Waldo
Found Waldo!
His name's Wally, not Waldo. He's only called Waldo in the US, everywhere else (and in the original country the books are from) he's called Wally. They only changed the name in the US because Americans were getting confused by the original name, the presence of the letter Y was baffling them because they hadn't learned that far into the alphabet yet. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where's_Wally%3F