FAMILY TREE
The Million Dollar Homepage had children. Here they are.
In August 2005 a student in England named Alex Tew put a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid on a web page and offered the pixels for sale at $1 each, in 10 × 10 blocks. The pitch was that the page would stay online and people would come to look at it. They did. The last 1,000 pixels went by auction in January 2006, and the grid has been full ever since.
You can’t buy a pixel there now. If you arrived wondering what the modern equivalent is, this is the list.
Why the original worked
The price was a joke anybody could afford, the page was one screen, and the scarcity was real: a million pixels and not one more. Each sale made the page more worth looking at, and each visitor made the next sale easier. It only works once, though. A full grid has nothing left to sell.
The descendants
- 01
Pixel grids
The direct copies: a canvas, a price per pixel, a promise to stay online. Plenty appeared in 2006 and most are gone. The trouble is that the second million-pixel page is not news.
- 02
Pay-for-nothing pages
Sites and apps that drop the grid and keep the joke. The I Am Rich app charged $999.99 to show a red gem. In 2015 Cards Against Humanity ran a Black Friday sale where you could give them $5 and receive nothing; it took in $71,145.
- 03
Pay-to-rank leaderboards
The 2026 version. No grid and no fixed price: a list sorted by how much each person paid, where the supply of first place is exactly one. outbid.lol set off the current wave.
- 04
PaidOneDollar.com
Where you are. It began as “pay $1 to see how many people paid $1” and grew a leaderboard. The entry price is still $1, the board never fills up, and the amounts are hidden from anyone who paid less.
A grid versus a leaderboard
On the Million Dollar Homepage, everyone paid the same rate and your spot was yours for good. On a leaderboard, the price of a given position isn’t set by the site at all. It’s set by whoever is standing in it, and it changes when they change their mind.
That makes a leaderboard cheaper to join and harder to win. A dollar gets you on. Staying near the top is a separate conversation between you and a stranger.
Questions
- Can you still buy pixels on the Million Dollar Homepage?
- No. All one million pixels were sold by January 2006. The page is still online as it was.
- Who made the Million Dollar Homepage?
- Alex Tew, then a student in England, launched it in August 2005 to pay for university.
- Is there a modern Million Dollar Homepage?
- The closest living relatives are pay-to-rank leaderboards such as PaidOneDollar.com, where you pay for a ranked row with a title and link instead of a block of pixels.