What the Million Dollar Homepage was
In August 2005 Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from Wiltshire, England, put a 1000 by 1000 pixel grid online and sold it at $1 per pixel, in 10 by 10 blocks. Buyers supplied a tiny image, a link and a hover slogan. The goal was to pay for his university course.
It became an internet phenomenon and drew a wave of copycats. In January 2006 the final 1,000 pixels went to auction on eBay, which brought the gross to $1,037,100.
The part nobody planned for
The page stayed up. Many of the things it pointed to did not. By 2017 many of its links had rotted, so the grid now works less like an ad board and more like a fossil record of 2005.
That is the real lesson for anyone building a page like it: a one-time purchase freezes. The pixels keep their colour. The meaning drains out.
Why FYCC is not a pixel grid
Forget Your Credit Card is also a strange page people pay to appear on, but nothing on it is bought once. You pick a monthly amount. Stripe bills it. Lifetime Forgotten is the sum of payments that actually went through, and the public board sorts the people who opt in to show it.
No ads, no links for sale, no space to buy. A spot on the board cannot be purchased at checkout; it moves only as confirmed payments add up over time. Stop paying and your total stops growing, which keeps the board current in a way a frozen grid never could.
Same instinct, different object
Both pages run on one old internet instinct: being visible somewhere absurd is worth a small, real amount of money to some people. The Million Dollar Homepage captured that instinct in a single sale. FYCC asks whether it holds up month after month.
Neither page promises anything in return. The point is the page.