Advertising...Huh...What is it good for?

A couple of months ago, you may remember reading about the million Dollar Homepage, a site who's goal, as it was obviously stated, was to make a million dollars. The site's owner's plan was to sell advertising one pixel at a time for one dollar a pixel. The purchased pixels were then placed on a large grid on his site for everyone to see and click. Not a bad idea, especially considering that the site reached it owner's goal of earning one million dollars.

What ensued was copy cats building sites that tried to do the same thing, but tweaked the concept one way or another, and as far as I know, none of the copycats have had success. This is usually the way things go isn't it? First to market always hits their goal while every other unoriginal hack flounders around trying to make a living off of another's idea.

Now another site is garnering attention from the tech crowd, OnlyOneAd.com. Instead of pixels, this site has one viewable advertisment posted on it's page every day. The cost of purchasing the ad will double in size until Ad 21, which will cost just over one million dollars. Another very creative idea, but this brings me to my question, or actually, my two-part question.

1. Why do companies advertise on a site like this?
2. Who visits these pages looking for a service?

It seems to me that the only reason these type of sites are garnering traffic is because visitors are interested in the idea of making one million dollars rather easily, not in finding a service that may be advertised there. It's not as if the advertisements are indexed in a manner in which I could find a spyware solution if I went looking for one. I can honestly say that I would never find myself visiting OnlyOneAd on the off chance that that day's ad may contain something I need.

I do believe that these ideas are inventive, but how they make their goals, or any money at all for that matter is beyond me. Maybe that why I haven't come up with my own million dollar idea yet.

Filed in:

• UncommonlySenseless
• Internet