What Is Pixel Advertising & Pages?

pixel

What is Pixel Advertising ?

Pixel advertising gained popularity in the last quarter of 2005 when British student Alex Tew created a website named The Million Dollar Homepage, and solicited advertisers to buy ad space measured in pixels on the homepage.

The price was set at $1 USD per pixel, and there were 1 million pixels of space available. In approximately five months all of the ad space was sold and Tew had made over one million dollars. (*this has subsequently proved to be a myth - see below)

This made news worldwide and gained public and business interest in pixel advertising.

The pixels are usually available in 100-pixel 'blocks' (each measuring 10x10 pixels). You will see most homepages divided into 10,000 of these 100-pixel blocks (= 1,000,000 pixels). The reason for selling them in 100-pixel blocks is because anything smaller would be too small to display anything meaningful.

What is The Pixel Wars about ?

The Pixel Wars web site was originally aim was to provide a directory service with the aim of listing every single pixel advertising web site, regardless of its origin.

Ripefruit Australia purchased The Pixel Wars web site in June 2007 and our aim now is to expose the myths behind Pixel Advertising as a money making industry.

As the originators of this web site predicted... there is a real pixel war going on!. The hype about this internet phenomenon is growing incredibly fast, so much so that we now receive hundreds of new pixel pages every week.

Pixel Advertising is a CON

Don't be conned, pixel advertising is nothing but a money making scam for the script sellers!

After buying The Pixel Wars web site, we became interested in the background of pixel advertising and its phenomenon.

Like most, we had heard of Alex Tew's highly successful MDH but apart from that, we would admit to not knowing much else. But what did surprise us, was how quickly we jumped on the Pixel Advertising train to stardom and success.

What we first noticed during our job of reviewing pixel advertising web sites for The Pixel Advertising directory, was how few 'real' paid advertisers there were on any of the web sites we were visiting.

At first we put this down to the fact that they were new web sites but after clearing up the backlog, we started reviewing web sites that had been in the directory for some time, and thats when it hit that few, if any had real paid advertisers, and most had little to no traffic.

The few web sites that did have pixel adverts, on closer inspection proved to be nothing more than 'self-promo ads', 'own site advertising' or advertising friends web sites.

We decided to check out the original Million Dollar Homepage with closer scrutiny. Without doubt Alex Tew's million dollar success was more to do with good marketing, and internet industry bent of the next new thing and thoughtless people hearing the shout of 'GOLD'.

Alex is welcome to provide proof of his million dollars (Bank Accounts statements are fine!) but we believe his only claim to fame will be creating a con industry... pixel advertising.

We visited hundreds of web sites on Million Dollar Homepage and found just too many anomolies.

If the advertiser mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article DS Laboratories Inc increased sales by 50% with a pixel advert we could not find* then why has 20centpixels.com with a pixel advert 5 times bigger than DS sold none?

So, who is making money from Pixel Advertising? The answer to this question is easy... software suppliers: sellers of the scripts to set-up your own Pixel Advertising web site..

Many web sites (including our own at one time) offer scripts with instant set-up and the promise of the big million dollars!

These scripts made it possible for people with little knowledge or skills to implement a pixel ad system on their website. This has sparked the growth of thousands of pixel websites worldwide.

How gullible the world can be... The Wall Street Journal called it a Pipe Dream - How Selling Pixels May Yield a Million Bucks.

The Pixel Marathon shows Top Earners for the Last Week and this week it features Bellefield.net at No 1. A close inspection of the advertising clearly shows 99% of the pixel advertising is affilation advertising. Clever, but still not paid advertising.

Number 2 was Fund My Boob Job, but sadly there was not enough advertising to fund a phone call let alone a boob job.

One major difference between the original Million Dollar Homepage and the subsequent script sites is direct linking. At least MDH linked directly to the advertisers web site giving the advertiser some benefit whereas the script sites link internally first (offering no out-going Pageank) and then to the advertisers url.

This means the only benefit to the advertiser is the real-time traffic generated by the Pixel Advertising web site. We seriously doubt anyone would be able to find a Pixel Advertising web site unless they search directly for a 'pixel advertising' web site, so the traffic they generate would largely be accidental or curious.

RESEARCH

Which are the Best Home Based Businesses for me? - says The Pixel Advertising Buzz is Over?! Pixel advertising started with the million dollar homepage, and that is where it ended. Simply buying a pixel script and putting up a homepage will not make a penny, advertising does not work that way!

The idea behind the million dollar homepage was "creating internet history"; it was a stunt.

They also point out the outgoing links, that were there on MDH but not on any of the script pages.

Finally, they show an interesting alternative which can be seen at www.bradfallon.com

INTERESTING READING

• Pygmalion effect
• Brand Autopsy
• Is Dance Pixel Cybostar UK a Scam?
• CompleteRipOff.com

WORST

• Globat Foundation - Proceeds go to hurricane Katrina victims. Our hearts go to the victims who must have received about $8.00 from this one.

* DS Laboratories Inc was found in the source code but could not be found on the page.

Don't say we did not tell you!

Enjoy The Pixel Wars