You may remember The Million Dollar Homepage. - the internet phenomenon where an enterprising student sold each pixel on his website for a dollar. But what happened to it? And what about those opportunistic advertisers who invested in its real estate?
On hearing about My Hex Colour (a site where, in exchange for a dollar, you can become the proud ‘owner’ of your favourite hex code colour), Kelvin at SiteVisibility revisited the godfather of the genre.
In fact, any idiot can look up milliondollarhomepage.com and reassure themselves that the most garish site on the web is still intact. More interesting is what Kelvin dug up on its advertisers.
According to Kelvin’s analysis, 16% of the site’s links are now pointing at 404 error pages, with another 12% redirecting to other websites.
So what can we learn from this? For one thing, online marketing is not just about links and clicks. Million Dollar Homepage may have resulted in a traffic spike for those sites that chose to advertise, but I’d be interested to know how many of those random clicks were converted into engaged visitors, let alone loyal customers.
Given that nearly a third of the original links are no longer operational, I’d suggest that those businesses who focused purely on traffic volume rather than qualified visitors have not been successful long term.
As Kelvin suggests, there may be incremental SEO benefit from backlinks, given that MDH was itself linked to by trusted sites like the BBC. However, most of those clicking on sites like Million Dollar Homepage arguably do so out of curiosity, not because they are interested in developing any sort of relationship with the advertiser - particularly when creative is limited to generic messages like ‘dating’.
Ultimately if you want to turn those clicks into customers, you need to be focusing on relevance, not just reach.
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