Aap! - Alternative Advertising Possibilities

Months ago when the Aedeas Group (The parent company to Aap!Global) was formed we read an article about the Million Dollar Homepage on the BBC News site.

The PR was effective, and within hours we decided to support young Alex Tew’s novel online advertising service to help him fund his college education.

We contributed with purchasing 200 dollars of purchasing space. You can see our mini advertisement above (see the three boxes of the Aedeas Group next to the Donut).

And while we thought it was a good idea, possibly a satire and even a scam, never did we expect that Tew would have sold out his platform and exit with a total of $1,037,100 in ad sales in less than a few months.

Buyer’s Remorse?

None at all – the gimmick has paid off greatly for most advertisers. The site still receives around 500,000 unique hits a day. How much traffic have we received? – Probably less than 200 clicks per month, but for advertisers world wide with cash to burn, buying 10,000 dollars worth of space on the board possibly could translate into some significant click through.

So Why Did We Support His Idea?

Yes, clearly the system is worse than any other media – it has zero targeting, a crowded framework, a lack of cohesive design and possibly discredits clients and more.
But because we thought it was a fun idea that challenged some of the foundations of online advertising and revealed some of the potential buy patterns of online advertisers we decided to support the project.

We weren’t alone - From a Wall Street Journal article on the site we find>

“While there’s also no way of knowing for sure whether Mr. Tew is the first entrepreneur to sell pixels, the idea was new enough that it felt that way to onlookers.

“I was like, ‘What’s this?’ ” says Daniel Khesin, vice president of marketing at DS Laboratories Inc., a skin-care company in Lake Success, N.Y. After examining Mr. Tew’s site, he says: “There was nothing inherently special about the page, but it was very obvious to us that at the very least, buying some pixels would be a good idea for the sheer number of visitors he was getting.”

DS Laboratories purchased 800 pixels. Almost overnight, he says, traffic surged at the company’s Web site by twentyfold, and all of the increase came from milliondollarhomepage.com. More impressive, he says, sales by Internet companies that DS Laboratories’ site links to jumped almost 50% within a week of the ad going up.

“Our skepticism was that this is untargeted traffic,” Mr. Khesin says. “But this advertising has definitely paid for itself many times forward. And unlike banner advertising where it goes away, people will always know where to find it to go back and purchase more products.”

Similarly, Chris Magras, president Evisions Marketing Inc. in Tempe, Ariz., which helps Web sites get higher rankings on search services, also noted milliondollarhomepage.com’s movement on Alexa.com. “Some people would say it’s a bad idea, some would say it’s a good one. All I know is that it was generating interest,” Mr. Magras says.

Evisions bought 6,400 pixels and its ad went up on a Friday. The following Monday morning, Evisions was getting 2,000 more unique visitors to its home page, all linked directly from milliondollarhomepage.com. The number of leads, or visitors filling out personal information on the Evisions site, jumped to 300 a day from 100.

“It was quality traffic,” Mr. Magras says. “It was definitely the biggest payoff for a one-stop ad buy we’ve ever had.” He adds that the company is still getting 800 to 1,000 new visitors daily from Mr. Tew’s site.â€?

Copycats popped up almost immediately; now there are hundreds of Web sites selling pixels, some of them directly crediting Mr. Tew — and even linking to his site. Some advertisers have put out press releases touting their alliances with Mr. Tew’s site, further helping spike his traffic.

The risk, of course, is that as the original pixel concept gets mimicked, it will suffer from brand dilution and become a less compelling a business model. What’s more, as milliondollarhomepage.com has filled up, it’s become harder for advertisers to stand out amid a busy screen with messages ranging from “CasinoScams” and “Free Ringtones” to “Jesus” and “Hypnosis”; the smallest ad spaces, at 100-pixels square, are nearly indecipherable at this point.

Whether Mr. Tew reaches a million dollars remains to be seen. He readily notes that he’d never do another site like the original. Now, he says, “the copycats are all competing with each other.”

One is Moneypants.com, a personal finance Web site geared toward women that says it has 600 members and has collected $4,500 over the last few weeks from its own pixel “Dream Page” — a decent chunk of change for a nascent enterprise.

“It’s very compelling,” says MoneyPants Chief Executive Komal Bhojwani. “We don’t have to end up going the investor route, which might require us to make changes to the business that we don’t want to make. And we didn’t have to get into debt by borrowing from a bank. We are generating revenue and not expenses.”

One advertiser, Cherryl Weaver, says she’s seen a 13% jump in traffic to her real estate Web site, www.hotlaneighborhoods.com, from the 1,500 MoneyPants.com pixels she bought. “As long as it’s a strategic alliance, it makes sense,” Ms. Weaver says, alluding to the affinity between a personal-finance site and real estate. “Would I team up with McDonald’s if they did a dream page? No.”

For his part, Mr. Tew says he wants to keep milliondollarhomepage.com online “forever.” If and when a million pixels are sold, he says he’ll leave the page frozen in time, no changes allowed, no new buyers permitted. His ultimate goal is as lofty as the original concept: He hopes his site will be like a time capsule showing “what’s possible on the Internet” — an iconic image that he imagines “one day might be a piece of art in a museum.” *

Interesting

And while we never thought of that he would have the success he did, it gives insight into advertising and execution.

More than anything else, The Million Dollar Homepage proves that any kind of new advertising model can work if the execution is right.

We commend Alex for his successful leverage of PR, the Blogosphere, word of mouth and viral marketing to keep the value (and hype) up. Whether or not people will care that their pixels are still up in five years (or five weeks) is undecided but from the happy customers above everyone seems to have won!

Thanks Alex for keeping things fun!