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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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Million Dollar Homepage - Attack of the Zombies

January 19, 2006

Alex Tew's website, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, that became famous for earning $1M (£566,000) for plots of pixels sold to advertisers, has had a turbulent start to 2006. Last week, Tew sold the final 1,000 pixels on Ebay for $38,100, reaching the goal of $1M only to be shut down by hackers this week. The site was shut down by a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack, launched after he refused to pay a $5,000 demand to blackmailers.

A colleague of mine in our New York office, Tim Keelan, suggested I blog about this site over Christmas, when the site reached its all time peak. The latest news about the zombie computer or DDOS attack finally prompted me to action.

On 25th December, the site hit a peak of .011% market share of all internet visits and a ranking of 1,567 among all sites on the internet based on UK visits. Not bad for a student hoping to raise a few bucks to pay for uni.

In the early days, the site received a larger share of its visits from blogs and chat rooms. By December, the site was benefiting from a good deal of media attention and was receiving 23% of its visits from websites in the Hitwise News and Media category. Visits from News and Media sites were more than five times the internet average, underscoring the importance of media attention to the site's growth.

With the sale of the final 1,000 pixels taking place last week, the share of internet searches for 'million dollar homepage' increased four times week on week and visits from search engines accounted for 37% of the site's visits (up from 29% in December).

Advertisers are reportedly pleased with the investment in the site - citing relatively high click through rates and conversion rates from the site. I took a look at a Hitwise Clickstream report for the site to see how much of the its traffic goes to advertisers.

As expected, eBay has been a huge beneficiary - both in terms of publicity around the auctions for pixels and the site's growth. Last week (week ending 14th January 2006) eBay (combined UK and .com properties) received 23% of downstream visits from the site. Following eBay I had trouble finding any rhyme or reason to the data - indicating a fairly level playing field for those advertisers getting noticed. A few of the ads jumped off the page at me and I thought that these sites would receive a higher percentage of downstream visits from the site. This is not necessarily the case.

Last week, Hitwise captured over 200 sites downstream from Million Dollar Homepage. The Times Online was the number three downstream site and received 2% of visits from the site. The Times Online has a prominent ad on the site and is often mentioned in articles about Million Dollar Homepage as one of the most high profile advertisers on the site. Also at the high end was www.engineseeker.com receiving 1.36% of downstream visits. Most advertisers fell in the range of .45% to .23% of downstream visits from the site.

The site's growth has been driven by media attention. The more visits the site receives the more clicks through to advertisers. While the site has been intermittently down over the past week, the DDOS attack may be a blessing in disguise - reinvigorating media (and the public's) interest in the site. Perhaps the second best decision (after launching the site) that Alex Tew ever made was to ignore the demand letter from the blackmailers.

Daily Market Share of UK Visits to Million Dollar Homepage
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