There are exquisite and complicated recipes like Friends Hot Coffee and there are simple and brilliant ideas like a Million Dollar Sandwich. That is an old, but extremely interesting story. In two words – a guy didn’t have enough money for higher education, but had an idea – he created Million Dollar Homepage that had 1 000 000 pixels of free space and offered them for sale for $1 per pixel.

Back in 2005 Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire was a bit short on his university education and came up with this brilliant idea. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 on 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The smallest piece in such a way was 100 pixels large, because a single pixel was no good for anyone to decipher

The website was launched on the 26th of August 2005 and almost immediately hundreds of similar projects were launched with only minor differences. Alex though was not worried of the competition saying “They have very little ads, therefore I guess it’s not going too well for them. The idea only works once and relies on novelty. Any copy-cat sites will only have pure comedy value, whereas mine possibly has a bit of comedy plus. So I say good luck to the imitators.”

On the 1st of January 2006, the final 1 000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The auction was closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38 100 that brought the final tally to $1 037 100 in gross income (Tew’s initial costs were €50, which included the registration fee and a basic web-hosting package).

On the 7th of January 2006, three days before the auction of the final 1 000 pixels was supposed to end, Alex got an e-mail from an organisation that called itself The Dark Group, and was threatened that The Million Dollar Homepage would become the victim of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) if a ransom of $5,000 was not paid by the 10th of January. Alex believed that the threat was not real and ignored it. A week later he received a second e-mail threat stating: “Hello u website is under us atack to stop the DDoS send us 50000$.” He again ignored the threat, but at that very moment the website was flooded with extra traffic and e-mails which caused it to crash. Later Alex explained: “I haven’t replied to any of them as I don’t want to give them the satisfaction and I certainly don’t intend to pay them any money. What is happening to my website is like terrorism. If you pay them, new attacks will start.”

The One Million Dollar Homepage was not accessible to any visitors for a whole week until the host server has upgraded the security system. Wiltshire Constabulary‘s Hi-Tech Crime Unit and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were called to investigate this attack. Though criminals were never found it was believed that they come from Russia.

So, what is the lesson that we can learn from this most magnificent story? There are actually several of them:

• even the most innovative and bold ideas can work;
• only those who dare to act win;
• success can actually come overnight (or for a couple of months);
• never give up to blackmailing;
• brilliant ideas can be more than simple.

And what do you think about this one million dollar sandwich?