Million Dollar Waste?
April 19th, 2006
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.
Buyerâ??s Remorse?
None at all â?? 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? â?? 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 â?? 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 werenâ??t alone - From a Wall Street Journal article on the site we find>
â??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.
