What's the Point of Using Pixels in Advertising?

What's the Point of Using Pixels in Advertising?

A young guy by the name of Alex Tew was about to begin his studies at a college in England while the summer of 2005 was drawing to a close there. He believed it was completely absurd that he would attend college for four or five years and then graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt (or pounds as it were). 

As a result, he came up with this really ridiculous plan to establish a website that would sell advertising space at a rate of one dollar per pixel, keep all of the advertisements online indefinitely (or for at least five years), and utilize the money from this endeavor to pay for his education. If he was successful in selling all of the pixel advertising spots over the course of the next five years, he would be able to bring in one million dollars.

Therefore, he went ahead and created milliondollarhomepage.com, recruited a number of friends to each purchase a couple hundred dollar spots, and informed the media. For some reason, the notion seemed to catch on like wildfire. After the story was picked up by a number of different media outlets, it wasn't long before he was getting thousands of visitors to his website every single day. 

After that, a number of other websites thought, "What the heck?" and began purchasing advertising space. This resulted in even more visitors and sales, which caused the situation to rapidly escalate. After only seven weeks of operation, the website brought in over $400,000 in revenue for him. Permit me to restate that: we are talking about the electronic transfer of a total of four hundred thousand dollars through the use of PayPal, 2Checkout, and wire transfers.

Other spin-off sites, such as QuarterMillionDollarHomePage.com, QuarterMillionDollarWebPage.com, MillionPennyHomePage.com, and literally hundreds of additional pixel advertising sites selling space for anywhere from a dollar a pixel down to a penny a pixel, and even a couple for free, began to appear almost immediately after the original site was launched. 

Turnkey million pixel advertising websites can now be purchased from websites such as RentAPatch.com; all you need to do is pay $90 for the author's code and you'll have your very own website up and running in no time. There are websites that act as directories; one of the most well-known of these is ThePixelWars.com, which lists the vast majority of the more than 400 sites available and enables users to rank and comment on each site individually. And then there's PixelList.com, which really blogs about the new "business," reviews a lot of the better pixel advertising websites, and writes beautiful little articles like the one you're looking at right now.

All right, all right — but then, what's the point???

As the co-founder of Pixel List together with Merlin Holmes, I have been giving a lot of thought to this topic as of late... Where is the logic in having so many websites devoted to pixel advertising? I mean, they're not exactly attractive... but despite their unattractiveness, there is some tension surrounding them. They are not targeted, but there is a significant amount of traffic directed toward them. Because they are not overly expensive to advertise on, an advertiser's return on investment (ROI) on these platforms can be extremely high. But if they don't truly "DO ANYTHING," then what's the point in having them around in the first place? Our best guess as to what they might be "doing" is as follows:

People are made aware of websites that they would have never come across otherwise thanks to the Pixel Advertising Sites

For example, mp3player.net sells an all-in-one device that combines an mp3 player and a headset (they call it "cordless," but in reality, you simply slip your memory into the headset and viola).Then there's oldboatpics.com, which features pictures of old boats; I mean, what the heck is the point of that, right? Now that I think about it, I probably spent a good five or six minutes looking at the photographs. After that, there was a website known as Pzizz.com, which positioned itself as the "ultimate powernap solution." We even identified a website that sells absinthe, which is an ancient liquor that many artists, like Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, and Toulouse-Lautrec, were known to imbibe.

It would appear to be a collection of unrelated things, wouldn't it?

Let's take a moment to consider this: the websites that offer pixel advertising are likely attracting those who are considered "early adopters." (These are the individuals that enjoy the feeling of knowing something before everyone else on their street.) Therefore, it stands to reason that some of these same early adopters (dare I say that they are the target market here?) will also be among the early adopters of the product some of the early adopters might find the "next big thing" by accident — oh oh — that reminds me — there was a site— I don't remember the name— I remember clicking on "Even Monkeys Fall from Trees"— it was a DVD set being sold called "BookofCool.com" or something like that— and it taught you all sorts of cool things like how to do basketball tricks, skateboard tricks, billiards tricks, etc.

Anyway, I've gotten off topic—whew! The point is that one part of what's working with the pixel advertising sites is that it's accidentally targeted to early adopters across a multitude of subcultures, and as a result, the requirement for being an early adopter is to find cool new stuff. The other part of what's working is that it's accidentally targeted at early adopters across a multitude of subcultures. Early adopters and sneezers, as Seth Godin of sethgodin.com likes to call them, will pass the word to others about pzizz, or book of cool, on to the next wave of people, and perhaps the little idea virus will spread. The websites with cool new stuff will find an audience within their respective subcultures.

And this, my devoted audience, is the crux of the matter. It occurred to me that rather than focusing solely on pixel advertising sites, PixelList.com needs to launch a review website dedicated to the websites that are brought to our attention by other pixel advertising websites.

Since the earliest days of the World Wide Web, Harris Fellman has been actively involved in Internet marketing (and perhaps a little before that). Harris is a co-founder of the websites PixelList.com and BuzzIM.com, and he also hosts a weekly internet marketing conference call for business owners.