100 Pixel Adventure

So, an interesting and tremendously ephemeral business model that's emerged is the million pixel ad site. Basically, you (and anyone can) put up a Web site with 10,000 100-squre pixel blocks, which are each about the same size as a pencil eraser. You then try to sell the squares for anywhere from a penny to a dollar per pixel, or up to $100 per little square. With no skill, capital or infrastructure required, one guy's neat idea quickly spawned about a thousand copycats (as tracked here).

The most successful imitator is Million Quarter Web Page which somehow managed to temporarily leap high on Alexa's rankings by serving up 30 million pages per day.

Taking a $25.00 risk, I dove in and bought a square for BasicLingo, my little advertising science project. (It's the tiny blue and pink arrow in the bottom-left quadrant.) Tale of the tape: 29 click throughs and somewhere between zero and $7.18 in revenue after 8 days.

I'll soon get a better cost-per-click rate than I do with search, but will wind up in the red with this untargeted traffic. I'm a little surprised that the click rate is so low, but the bigger ads are definitely a lot more prominent. Don't think I'm willing to risk real money, like a hunert or two, to test that hypothesis, though.