Dotty over dot-com dots

A mere 139 days after his Million Dollar Homepage was launched, Alex Tew reached his goal, and exceeded it by over £20,000.

The 21-year-old single-handedly resurrected the e-millionaire mania of some years back, created an internet advertising sub-genre and, quite possibly, set himself up for life. It was a simple idea that has now been copied by thousands of people worldwide. What began with a late-night brainstorm on his bed; can now be bought as a ready-made code bearing promises of untold riches.
Can you make a million too?
The internet’s newest millionaire had barely had a moment to enjoy his new found status before someone was after his money. Having announced the winning bidder of his auction for the last 1000 pixels on his link-laden website, Alex received an e-mail threatening a DDoS attack. Tew ignored the threat, but within days the Million Dollar Homepage could no longer be found and an extortionate demand for payment of $50,000 ransom ensued.
A DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service) is created by malicious hackers sending a barrage of activity through ‘zombie computers’ (compromised by viruses of Trojan horse programs) towards a computer system or network in order to consume bandwidth and cause loss of connectivity and services. Tew accepts that he could not have predicted the magnitude with which his idea would be swept up by publicity, but it is clear that exposure has worked both for and against him. This malevolent action is now being investigated by the FBI, as Tew’s site is hosted in America by Sitelutions, but this unforeseen attention could prove costly to the undergraduate.
“The site received a major DDoS attack, and DDoS protection/prevention was not included in the customer’s plan,” states Russell Weiss of InfoRelay Online Systems Inc. - owners and operators of Sitelutions. “That said; we voluntarily took a number of steps to alleviate this attack while working within the appropriate budget.”
With Tew having promised to keep the site online for at least five years, the DDoS attacks raise the prospect that running the Million Dollar Homepage may prove more expensive than he originally envisaged. Hopefully the steps currently taken will be enough to keep the site safe; the site is also unlikely to garner as much traffic in the future, neverthe-less it proves that the greater the idea, the greater the ramifications.
The copycat commotion on the internet and eagerness of code-makers to sell you an automated millionaire’s marketing homepage might suggest that the web is paved with golden pixels. This is not so. The success of Alex Tew’s site can be attributed to its originality and the simplicity of the marketing concept, but also to the key details of his syndicated story. His identity as a student, his goal of university funding, the need for socks, the fact he was studying Business Management - all of these make the story quirky and more appealing to those picky media gate-keepers. These endearing little elements helped the story establish the page and stand out from the crowd beyond the other weird and wonderful press releases touching editor’s desks.
The other key factor of its immense success was because it was an intriguing story, at a time when the internet is truly becoming a very swift filter of information.
Several sites played a central role in raising the profile of Tew’s endeavour. A major player and possibly the first to champion the story was Digg.com, and that caused what is known as ‘The Digg Effect.’ The site itself is about a year old but already has close to 100,000 members posting and voting on unique stories they find around the internet, it is visited by over a million people each day to get their daily dose of unique news.
‘The Digg Effect’ occurs when a particular story gains enough votes from members who deem it newsworthy and is promoted to the homepage. When this happens, look out. If an article moves up to the Digg homepage, it can cause tens of thousands of visitors to arrive at the web site where the original article first appeared. ‘The Digg Effect’ has been known to crash unprepared websites within hours of a story being posted.
After raising his first $1000, Tew paid for a press release to be distributed. Luckily for Alex, a Digger (a Digg.com member) posted the press release. Within hours the story was promoted to the Digg homepage and Tew’s site was flooded by an estimated 40,000 visitors in the hours that followed.
If this was the end of the story, he probably would not have sold all one million pixels in less than five months. The story next took a twist that sealed Tew’s fate and paved the way for his ultimate success. If a website is relatively new, like Alex Tew’s was, ‘The Digg Effect’ can have far reaching results because of the policies of another site owned by Amazon.com called Alexa. Currently, there are over 10 million people who have downloaded the Alexa tool bar, and their surfing is used to globally rank sites in terms of traffic. The Alexa homepage carries a section aptly named ‘Movers and Shakers’ which catalogs the sites with the greatest traffic growth worldwide. Having gone from nothing to an incredible amount of traffic in a short space of time catapulted the Million Dollar Homepage to the front of Alexa and the eyes of millions.

In many ways Alex Tew had the right idea, and was in the right place at the right time.
If a retired milkman or a Google executive had invented ‘pixel marketing’ and sent out some press releases it probably wouldn’t have taken hold in the same way. Tew didn’t create a new profitable internet surety; he did however revive the world’s interest in ideas and that is well worth some merit. Unfortunately the world responded by duplicating his idea beyond sense rather than putting in any actual thought; even despite Tew’s advice to: ‘get creative’. While he may have made a pretty penny from the copycats who wanted a link from the original, his imitators will be disappointed unless they put in that little extra effort.
Top of the bill on creatively making the idea their own, so far, within the student category is Andrew Cargill (19) and Tony Lane (27) with their Million Dollar Movie Project at www.themilliondollarmovieproject.com. The students from the International Film School Wales are hoping to raise funds for their first feature by asking for donations as little as £3. Each benefactor will be made an executive producer, leading the pair toward their second goal of making it into the Guinness Book of Records for the longest ever movie credits.

Read Alex Tew’s full story in his Million Dollar Blog at:
www.milliondollarhomepage.com