It’s been over 2 years since the famous Million Dollar Homepage launched and, amazingly, it is still sending around 300 unique visitors per month to one of my clients.
Lings Lease Cars purchased a 900 pixel block for £400 in September 2005 and in the last 18 months since Google Analytics was installed (well after the initial burst of publicity) the site has sent 6,792 unique visitors.
Assuming the site sent 10,000 visitors then this works out at a CPC of about 4 pence which is a lot better than most other display adverts.
The traffic is actually a much better quality than you might expect. Visitors look at an average of 1.5 pages per visit and the bounce rate is much lower than traffic from some of the social news sites we use today.
Some of you might be wondering how big an advert you get for £400, well try and spot Ling in the screenshot below and you can see just how small the ad was. The screenshot is just a small proportion of the full pixel grid.
How an advert this small can receive any clicks is beyond me. The ad covers just 0.09% of the total area which means the site must be sending a total of around 10,000 visitors per day to the advertisers.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow thats amazed me, I would have thought that would have died of death a long time ago.
Mind you Alex Tew’s (the guy behind MDHP) new project pixellotto doesn’t seem to have had the same impact, looks like it finished well before the grid was full.
I can see my ad on your screen shot there. I got 2 blocks ($200) and I still see a bit of traffic today.
I have had 31 visits this month from there so far. Average per month has been about 40 visits.
The first month I had the 200 pixels put up I got just short of 750 visits from it.
But what about the quality of the traffic? what about automated crawelers? And with Lings Leases in the UK, what use is traffic from sources outside of the UK.
MDHP, in my opinion, was all about the story, and helping the guy out with his uni expenses.. I am surprised she has had conversions though….
It is really amazing that you have noticed this. I fill bad that I am not the lucky one who bought pixels there.
Later when millions copycats appeared I bought some pixels on another sites but they did not send me any traffic and later dissapeared.
Nice discovery. This had surely amazes me. I thought, when MDH was launched, no one will actually visit a page with full of ads and no one will actually click on the ads since it is so “colorful”!
Anyway, if traffic quality is being taken into account like what Simon had pointed out, this is like advertising with those paid-to-surf sites or traffic exchange sites out there.
It is really amazing about the amount of traffic in the site.
Hurm, i didn’t know that buying pixels will generate huge traffic like that. I have always thought that it’s just a waste of money. I should have become more optimistic. Urgh.. =)
I’m amazed that it still is getting the traffic that it gets!
Steve
That’s quite a nice results. Just 4 pence. How about the ROI?
Hello, it is Ling!
Well, milliondollar is the only pixel site I have ever bought pixels on. The original and the best. I used my head because it was the only small (!!! or BIG?) thing that would stand out. If you look (even on the larger greyscale screenshot) there are no humans pictured on it. It is human nature to be attracted to human faces (even mine). It also helps that it’s real picture, not a generic library face.
I do not really know if I have sold cars from the advert, my website has some viral aspect (ie, people talk about it because it is a bit …lively) and I get loads of traffic from unlikely sources, eg. being one of the “10 worst websites”. So it could be that people have visited the page and blogged about me, or passed me on to friends and family and visits and benefit have come from a few very different sources. Who knows? Does anyone REALLY know? I don’t.
I spent that £400 on the basis that I know Alex’s site would work, that he got loads of publicity, that he was British so a lot of publicity was in the UK, and that he seemed a genuinely nice guy. Rather give money to him than to Google, Yahoo etc. So many people have mentioned that they have seen me on milliondollar, but really I would be lying if I knew how many cars I had sold from it, directly or indirectly. From time to time I get bursts of activity from milliondollar, it must get press occasionally. The page will be there for ages, too.
Sometimes you just have to gamble on links.
It was a really good and unique concept when started but its clones just made it a big failure. Traffic is fine, but do you think google might be happy with the linking of that kind? Still the quality of the listed websites will be decreased due to bad neighbours probably.
Well, I did it 50% to support that Alex Tew, who frankly deserved support for his idea. Well done to him. Plus it was British-based. Maybe Patrick will have opinion on whether this affect Google ratings? Patrick???…
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It certainly won’t harm your rankings if you have a link from it. Maybe it will help a bit but with all those links I doubt it.
More comments from Patrick AltoftJust an update as I have seen a visitor from this page this morning.
I have been speaking with Alex Tew and he is very chipper. He has just launched a run of signed MDHP prints and I have gladly bought one. I am very happy to continue supporting him and predict big things from this man in the future.
Frankly, it does not matter to me where traffic comes from, it all gets mixed in one giant pot, i think people try to be far too specific on the web. And remember, many people want to have fun, so you have to reward them (with fun) for visiting your page to say “thanks”. Does no one else ever get this?? I seem to be quite alone in business in this aspect.
Unique web visits to my page now consistently above 50k/mth, some stunning publicity (inc being featured as a character in Viz magazine) helps, all free. Whoever relies on AdWords, there are many other opportunities out there. You just have to look.
Ling
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