Миллионный Доллар за Пиксель: История Успеха и DDoS-Атаки

Website

The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels. On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross. During the January 2006 auction, the website was subject to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) and ransom demand, which left it inaccessible to visitors for a week while its security system was upgraded. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Wiltshire Constabulary investigated the attack and extortion attempt. After a short time, Tew decided to drop out of the business degree program for which he had created the site in the first place. As of 2019 The Million Dollar Homepage was still receiving thousands of daily viewers, although by 2017, many of the website's links suffered from link rot, causing the URLs to no longer function as originally intended.

Alex Tew, a student from Cricklade in Wiltshire, England, conceived The Million Dollar Homepage in August 2005 when he was 21 years old. He was about to begin a three year Business Management course at the University of Nottingham, and was concerned that he would be left with a student loan that could take years to repay. In 2005, the pound was strong against the dollar: £1 was worth approximately $1.80, and that cost per pixel may have been too expensive for many potential buyers. The homepage featured a Web banner with the site's name and a pixel counter displaying the number of pixels sold, a navigation bar containing nine small links to the site's internal web pages, and an empty square grid of 1,000,000 pixels divided into 10,000 100 pixel blocks. Tew promised customers that the site would remain online for at least five years – that is, until at least 26 August 2010.

Because individual pixels are too small to be seen easily, pixels were sold in 100 pixel "blocks" measuring 10 × 10 pixels; the minimum price was thus $100. The technology news website The Register featured two articles on The Million Dollar Homepage in September. By the end of the month, The Million Dollar Homepage had received $250,000 and was ranked Number 3 on Alexa Internet's list of "Movers and Shakers" behind the websites for Britney Spears and Photo District News. On 6 October, Tew reported the site received 65,000 unique visitors; it received 1465 Diggs, becoming one of the most Dugg links that week. Eleven days later, the number had increased to 100,000 unique visitors. On 26 October, two months after The Million Dollar Homepage was launched, more than 500,900 pixels had been sold to 1,400 customers. By New Year's Eve, Tew reported that the site was receiving hits from 25,000 unique visitors every hour and had an Alexa Rank of 127, "I actually contacted the people by phone and turns out they weren't serious, which is fairly frustrating, so I removed those bidders at the last minute", said Tew. The winning bid was $38,100, placed by MillionDollarWeightLoss. com, an online store selling diet related products. Tew remarked that he had expected the final bid amount to be higher due to the media attention. After costs, taxes and a donation to The Prince's Trust, a charity for young people, Tew expected his net income to be $650,000–$700,000.

On 7 January 2006, three days before the auction of the final 1,000 pixels was due to end, Tew received an e mail from an organisation called "The Dark Group", and was told The Million Dollar Homepage would become the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) if a ransom of $5,000 was not paid by 10 January. Believing the threat to be a hoax, he ignored it, but a week later received a second e mail threat: "Hello u website is under us to stop the DDoS send us 50000$." The website was inaccessible to visitors for a week until the host server upgraded the security system, and filtered traffic through anti DDoS software. By November 2005, the website had received attention from The Wall Street Journal and media around the world. During a week long trip to the US, Tew gave several media interviews. The concept was described as "simple and brilliant", "clever", "ingenious", Don Oldenburg of The Washington Post was one of the few without praise for the site, calling it a "cheap, mind bogglingly lucrative marketing monstrosity, an advertising badlands of spam, banner ads and pop ups." Oldenburg continues, "it looks like a bulletin board on designer steroids, an advertising train wreck you can't not look at. It's like getting every pop up ad you ever got in your life, at once. It's the Internet equivalent of suddenly feeling like you want to take a shower." and profiled in the online BBC News Magazine.

Tew dropped out of the business degree the site was set up to fund after one term. In 2008, Tew founded Popjam, an Internet aggregation and social networking business. On May 4, 2012, Tew co founded software company Calm with Michael Acton Smith. As of 2016, Tew was working as an entrepreneur in San Francisco. As of 2017, only the main page of the website was available, with all sub pages returning a 404 Not Found message. By April 2019, according to the BBC, approximately 40% of the site's links were suffering from link rot. The site was still receiving several thousands of viewers per day.