all talk and no action

When Alex Tew, a 21-year-old from Wiltshire, launched The Million Dollar Homepage I dismissed the idea as a stupid one that had come too late. After all, Save Karyn appeared much earlier, and while the owner of that site may have managed to scrounge $20,000 in 20 weeks to pay off her credit card debts, the internet community had got wise and it wouldn't be possible to pull off a similar stunt again.

Or would it? The Million Dollar Homepage, which sells pixels to advertisers for $1 each, has now sold over 680,000 pixels. That's over $680,000 in Alex's pocket. I feel sick.

Thankfully, American Copywriter has come to the rescue with five stages of dealing with the "why didn't I think of that?" syndrome.

I've passed stage four now:

Depression: "The now-famous guy behind the site is 21 years old and, as of today, has sold 62.4% of the page. Which means that he's probably made a good $600K in the last few months. What was I doing when I was 21 years old? Wait, I know -- getting myself into debt. And drinking."

And now I've reached the final stage:

"I should write a post about this."

I feel better already.

[via Adrants]

At least this bloke had an interesting idea. I found SaveKaryn pretty odious.

I have no idea who the SaveKaryn site appealed to other than maybe casual users. Million Dollar Homepage on the other hand appeals to "users with a website and money to burn for traffic/exposure".

We couldn't stand it ourselves though and had to relaunch our MP3Board.com website as a pixel ad site. However, we're only accepting ads from music/mp3/band/podcast/cd/radio type sites in order to create a useful directory of music related advertisers.

To small of a niche? Time will tell.