Posted at Monday, November 14, 2005  EDT  

Million dollar babies

Ivor Tossell,  Globe and Mail Update

This week: how to make a million dollars on the Web, and how not to.

Let's start with the not. Our case study will be "My Million Dollar Year," a project of Toronto performance artist Astrid Bin. Bin was a heavily indebted art-school grad who decided to spend 2005 trying to raise $1-million by dint of self-promotion.

Up went mymilliondollaryear.net on Jan. 1, complete with a blog and a "Contribute money" button, and on piled the media attention. Bin set about travelling North America, sending out press releases, doing phone-in shows and promoting the project, which she says is art, in the school of "profitism." A number of major outlets picked up her story.

But while Bin's site is long on content, her revenue streams are leaving her a little short. She hopefully put "artifacts" from her year up for sale on-line. Her losing lottery tickets could be yours for $300; the pen with which she failed the Jeopardy quiz-show entrance test for $700. For $50, she will call and talk to you about any subject. Ads on the front page start at $1,500 a day, which might explain why there aren't any.

With seven weeks to go, Bin has raised $4,248, although the Million Dollar Bake Sale has yet to wrap up (two cookies for $12). "It could all change tomorrow," counters a cheery Bin, reached by phone (disclosure: we didn't pay). She points out that she's still accumulating lottery tickets.

But, you protest, this is unfair. Who could reasonably expect to extract seven digits from strangers in exchange for more or less nothing?

If you must know, his name is Alex Trew. He is a 21-year old student, he lives in the United Kingdom and he has made $565,200 (U.S.) by selling off the one million pixels on his Million Dollar Homepage (milliondollarhomepage.com) at $1 apiece.

Pixels are cheap these days. The tiny dots that make up the images on our monitors are barely big enough to see individually, and every Web page contains hundreds of thousands of them. The notion of selling individual pixels has the same kind of cheerful fraudulence as bottling dehydrated water.

So Trew arranged his million-pixel billboard into a grid of 10,000 squares of 100 pixels apiece -- big enough for the tiniest of pictures, but still smaller than your mouse pointer. Each square hit the open market, and drawn in by novelty value and word of mouth, the advertisers came. Some spent $100 to buy a single tiny square; some spent thousands and lumped their tiny squares together into a bigger ad.

What's most remarkable is that there is nothing on the site except ads. Most sites on the Internet twist themselves in pretzels to come up with content that will attract readers, who will attract advertisers. The Million Dollar Homepage, with its gimmicky premise and gaudy advertising, became its own attraction, like a digital Times Square.

Indeed, it's a flashy, gaudy, strangely beautiful mosaic. Part of the fun is watching advertisers trying to make the most of such tiny palettes -- some opt for style, others for boldness. Some even bought batches of pixels and are now subletting them for a profit.

Equally appealing is how each tiny tile of the mosaic leads to a different advertiser's website on a different corner of the Web. Seldom do you see such a tight concentration of links on one page; the Million Dollar Homepage is a graphic representation of the Web's scope, and the insignificance of individual sites. Once again, real art on the Internet has reared its head in the most unlikely place.

The take-home lesson here is that the Web works like every other business: better to sell a million small items of dubious value than a few expensive ones. On the homepage of My Million Dollar Year, a side note announces that the site has had a million hits. "Imagine if all those people had shot me a buck," Bin laments in the same note. Perhaps she should have asked them to.

webseven@globeandmail.ca