In August 2005, a British student named Alex Tew launched "The Million Dollar Homepage," a website that sold advertising space in 10-by-10-pixel blocks for one dollar per pixel. Tew's goal was to raise money for his education, and he succeeded beyond expectations. Media coverage and the public's desire to be "part of the history of the Internet" helped push the project past the million-dollar mark. But what has become of that page today? According to a study from Harvard University, it is rotten to the core: more than 500 links return errors, and a good portion redirect or are up for sale.
The web has changed dramatically over the past decade. Services, design, speed... digital empires that once seemed indestructible are now museum pieces. Technologies essential to users have been replaced by superior solutions, and the mere idea of going back feels strange. Studying portals from ten or fifteen years ago is easy thanks to platforms like the Internet Archive, but those copies cannot fully reproduce the mindset of the era. Today we invite you to step back to August 2005, when Windows XP ruled the world and Facebook was just 18 months old.
English student Alex Tew launches "The Million Dollar Homepage," and everyone rushes to buy a piece of it. E-commerce! Novelty! A historic event! The price of one dollar per pixel seemed like a bargain. The last thousand pixels were auctioned on eBay in early 2006, selling for 38 times their original value. The portal was complete: $1,037,100. Twelve years later, what remains of that site?
Harvard Dissects the Decay
The Library Innovation Lab at Harvard University decided to find out. Technically, The Million Dollar Homepage is still there, frozen. There are no animations, nothing of the sort. However, the facade crumbles when we start clicking. The only two links that work at the top lead to the Twitter profile of its creator and to Calm.com, where he is now CEO.
Through its Perma.cc project, the lab determined that of the 2,816 available links, 547 are inaccessible, and 489 lead to another domain or are up for sale. The vast majority of remaining links no longer represent their original purpose, and only isolated examples remain, like the link for cheap ink cartridges in the upper-left corner.
A Skeleton of a Site
In summary, Harvard concluded that The Million Dollar Homepage is little more than an empty directory. Its pixel equivalent to $487,000 is now link rot, and it is likely that the deterioration will continue. This reminds us of the enormous challenges we face in archiving and preserving the web.
For more information, see the official announcement and visit The Million Dollar Homepage itself.
