>Of the 2,816 links that embedded on the page (accounting for a total of 999,400 pixels), 547 are entirely unreachable at this time. A further 489 redirect to a different domain or to a domain resale portal, leaving 1,780 reachable links
Looking at the million dollar homepage, many of the links were never valid:
These links are all shown in plain red ("link to unreachable or entirely empty pages") in the "visualization of link rot," so it looks like the authors didn't account for invalid URLs.
>In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse (Spinellis, 2003, Lawrence et al., 2001). Nelson and Allen (2002) examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.
Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days2; Vitorio checks bookmarks from 1997, finding that hand-checking indicates a total link rot of 91% with only half of the dead available in sources like the Internet Archive; the Internet Archive itself has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead3. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).
There's an automatic system on Wikipedia now which attempts to rescue dead links by finding the page in the Internet Archive and updating the Wikipedia page accordingly.
A few years ago, there was a bot automatically submitting all links to archive.is and adding the archive links to Wikipedia. It got blocked and the site banned for spam. There was another discussion about it last year, and the consensus was to remove the site from the spam list so that links would be allowed again. (Not sure if that actually happened or not though.)
If you're curious, take a look at the discussions at the following links:
Those RFCs seem to have nothing to do with my suggestion.
In Wikipedia's usual frustrating manner, it's unclear to me what was even going on to trigger those RFCs or why people thought it was a problem. For some reason they were upset with links to archive.is. But why? Was archive.is replacing working links with archive links, or something?
Edit: From what I can tell, the archive.is bot was doing the same thing the archive.org bot Animats mentioned was doing. It's just archive.is didn't follow Wikipedia's policies and procedures.
I know that few people likely keep locally saved Web pages in near line accessibility. But if you only build the tool, I would happily mount the nearly 5 terabytes of ULTRASCSI drives I've got in storage, which were largely Squid cache snapshots, from my office WAN proxy box.
Thanks for all your help with suggestions everyone!
I'm more inclined to use Apache Lucene.
Both because of the abundance of people doing similar extraction from comparable data stores, but also because Lucene is a part of the Hitachi data suites which are my business choice.. Allowing I ever return to business.
I mention Hitachi only because by anointing Lucene in a Tier 1 product, if I encounter the need to provide a audit that is relied upon to attest any sensitive data is purged from the cache, I'm sure that it will be acceptable in the format of such a high end system report.
Of course that's window dressing,but my aim is to get big businesses to contribute more old data... just who might aggressively retain data for their own reasons, compliance and security the usual needs,
Well those donors are who need the reassurance of a more vendor.
I wrote above the delightful ideas this prompted me to forget about dinner last night, so I will stop here.
But I cannot help but feel in my gut this is a real and viable project that can snowball and be a huge thing.
Oh, sorry, I misled you, I have to add what just now came to my mind : anything that encourages big companies to give into really old data archives, is just when they are ripe for selling new bulk capacity. The need for refreshing the media is so overlooked by businesses that otherwise have great practices. So you can nudge even the least hungry prospect customers towards your sales team.
Can someone enlighten me to a better appreciation of the moderation of my above comment?
I don't understand, unless maybe I was gushing somewhat. I do that. I'm female. And despite decades writing programs mainly for my personal research, I have a non technical, traditional media business, corporate experience of computing.
So when I look around here, I am both very happy to not see references to big ticket kit, and the feeling of independence is fresh without question.
But I cannot recall any acknowledgement of the tooling that corporations have habitually to hand. That GitLab controversy I thought hardly touched the issues of providing the level of service that major enterprises require and do obtain from the market, instead of using open source software for singularly critical infrastructure, without any analysis of the alternatives. It would be very boring to discuss storage products, its hard to get real information about them, even, despite the influence of a host of new companies. But the debate didn't touch a single advantage or aspect of the options exist.
I'm in total darkness trying to guess what I spoke improperly. I thought I might prompt someone who sells hardware support for say Ceph clusters, to comment, using the idea to gain awareness their own business.
But a silent, cold, zero, feels badly in need of some sort of company that commiserates the comment I wrote. I can totally grok if the Shut Up Woman reflex is one I have prompted you to feel. My bad, I usually have a lid on the gush. Is the idea so awful? I only know that the commission on storage systems is still enormous, and I think in particular younger HN types could make sheer bank, in a EDS sales setting, where real understanding of technology is, well, imperfect. It seems like the HN world doesn't acknowledge the corporate world much. That's a pity, if true. Below the household name corporations are so many in real need of serious minds, and I know personally that the salaries are not as bad as they are made to look at with statistics when debated here, I mean you think a typical character here is going to be a bottom decile performer, or top centile producer, compared against the big wobbly world of corporate computer departments?
I use (as the other reply said) wget, and SiteSucker. I find SiteSucker seems to do a slightly better job at times, and requires less finessing, which is useful when I'm about to hop on a plane for a long flight but want to grab documentation or a website to browse through.
wget is probably the tool you are looking for. You need to do a bit of work to get the options right. Ones to consider are --input-file=file, --level=1, --convert-links, --page-requisites, --follow-ftp, --span-hosts, and --adjust-extension. You can just export your bookmarks or history or whatever as a file full of links and use that as input to wget, and it will retrieve all of them.
There are some other handy tools like youtube-dl, which let you archive not just youtube videos, but many different types of media content. Including soundcloud and bandcamp.
Very interesting, I was thinking just an hour ago that IPFS would be perfect for references in academic literature, as it's immutable and always available.
Decaying in more than one way. The JS files on milliondollarhomepage.com start with:
/*
FILE ARCHIVED ON 5:47:20 Aug 6, 2015 AND RETRIEVED FROM THE
INTERNET ARCHIVE ON 20:45:17 Aug 24, 2015.
JAVASCRIPT APPENDED BY WAYBACK MACHINE, COPYRIGHT INTERNET ARCHIVE.
ALL OTHER CONTENT MAY ALSO BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT (17 U.S.C.
SECTION 108(a)(3)).
*/
Either that, or the homepage owner doesn't want to pay the hosting (bandwidth) costs, so he/she just references the Way Back machine. This is kinda brilliant.
returns an HTTP 200 (not a 301/302). Additionally, the comment says:
/*
FILE ARCHIVED ON 5:47:20 Aug 6, 2015 AND RETRIEVED FROM THE
INTERNET ARCHIVE ON 20:45:19 Aug 24, 2015.
JAVASCRIPT APPENDED BY WAYBACK MACHINE, COPYRIGHT INTERNET ARCHIVE.
ALL OTHER CONTENT MAY ALSO BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT (17 U.S.C.
SECTION 108(a)(3)).
*/
Note the dates. It was archived on Aug 6, 2015 and retrieved just 18 days later on Aug 24, 2015. Given it's 2017, there's no way this file is being served directly from archive.org's servers.
The '/index_files/' bit seems to imply someone went to the internet archive, pulled up milliondollarhomepage, and then in a Browser, did 'Save As Webpage Complete' which saves the main page (in this case index.htm) and all its assets in a sub folder called 'index_files'.
They then just copied it all as-is back into some web hosting.
The Million Dollar Homepage is not decaying (it is still serving its million dollar purpose) - it is the Web itself that has decayed. The brittleness of URIs is on full display. "Cool URLs don't change," but most of these URLs were never cool: they had to rent coolness from Internet cool kid Alex Tew.
It's a frame of reference problem. Note that this article is published by a library research group. One of the hottest topics in library science is how to archive and reference the WWW. While it's entirely valid to view the Million Dollar Web Page as a decaying artifact (let's call this the Art Critic view), it is also possible to view it as an archaeological record that needs its links to be complete (let's call this the archaeologist view).
Librarians are always worried about preserving garbage, which is what the Million Dollar Web Page is. Now before you downvote me, bear in mind I did Information Science in grad school, so I hung around with a lot of librarians. I know the librarian hoarder mindset pretty well.
The point I'm trying to make is that the Internet is a different kind of thing than a library, it is more dynamic (which is good and bad) and generally a more living and lived-in type of medium. MDH was a money making scheme. Clever? Maybe. Intended to be long-lasting? Doubtful.
Old buildings stand until they decay or we run out of space nearby and demolish them. HTML doesn't decay and we can't run out of URLs; web pages only disappear because our hosting infrastructure needlessly demands ongoing payment from (only!) the author.
I say "needlessly" because the actual cost of storage, CPU, and networks are dropping so quickly that hosting a page forever should asymptotically approach a fixed cost that isn't much more than the first few years.
> I say "needlessly" because the actual cost of storage, CPU, and networks are dropping so quickly that hosting a page forever should asymptotically approach a fixed cost that isn't much more than the first few years.
As someone who's been involved in internet hosting since the days of dial-up, that's just not true. Or rather, it's not the whole picture. Hardware breaks and becomes unsupported. Dynamic pages run on software that rots. Is a hosting provider expected to still support pages that run on SSI, CGI with Perl that requires libraries that haven't been updated in 15 years and are full of security holes?
Who's going to pay to move websites to new hardware? For the trouble of ensuring backups are working properly? For reacting to legal problems?
Hosting involves a lot more than sticking a .html page behind an internet connection. Software rots. Webpages rot. Someone has to be paid to provide upkeep.
This really bothers me about the state of webhosting. Trying to host your own stuff always feels so ephemeral because of monthly payment schemes and the need for maintenance. But the alternative of ad supported services like Facebook are fundamentally anti-user and evil by nature.
Im really wishing for one of the big cloud providers to offer a one time payment guarenteed for life "digital locker". A single e2e encrypted service to store my digital assets. Essentially an online scrapbook that you could add to and journal your whole life in without any prying eyes or advertisement.
Yes! One time payment for life storage is a great idea. I would also want to be able to serve some content publicly for ~100 years, so that it would be accessible even after my death. I called it the 'Century Archive' and wanted to price forever storage at $1/MB (for design as well as economic reasons).
For MillionDollarHomepage.com 90% of these links are clickbait banner ads for scams; the underlying link is often controlled by a middle-man, redirecting to a site of the buyer’s choosing.
So, on the other hand, if someone isn't willing to sponsor the cheap cost of hosting a site, maybe that site and its content isn't worth preserving?
The article seems to be suggesting that the Million Dollar Home Page has in some sense failed to fulfill it's promise because many of the links are now dead. I don't follow that logic at all. To me it seems that the MDHP's job was to be an iconic piece of internet history, and they've entirely fulfilled their end of the bargain.
I don't see how the article suggests that. The article is using the Million Dollar Homepage as an example to draw attention to interesting things about internet history, including the complexity of archiving internet content. The page itself isn't being attacked, but rather used to exemplify a broader concern.
The article uses the Million Dollar Home Page as an example of an interesting historical artifact that tells us a lot about the internet of 2005 in terms of design, the context in which the page was created, etc.
However, Million Dollar Home Page is also used as an example of the complexity of archiving internet content, i.e. archiving a page in a complete way must also involve archiving the pages it links to, otherwise the functionality of the archived page will decay over the years. This has important implications for its usefulness as a historical artifact.
Most of us remember what the internet was like when the Million Dollar Home Page was created, but many years from now, it will be challenging for people studying the history of the internet to really know what it was like back then unless we archive things in a way that preserves functionality.
that's beautiful and all, but nothing works like that. a page is lots of things. the html and js can be preserved like an artifact in a museum, ok. but the rest, the server hosting it, its connection to the internet, it being http only, etc... has to be preserved like architectural works. yes, some building facade migth still look like it was build in the 1800, but everything in it is updated to conform to fire code, exit signaling, etc.
so, in the end, even if we managed to keep that page up, it would still be of very little interest to the pople of the future.
the proper way to do things is to document everything. by good historians.
The article does not purport to have a solution to this problem. It is a contribution to an ongoing effort to describe the problem and understand it so that solutions may be pursued.
That sounds like a excellent opportunity for corporate IT departments to make a good haul of PR and general kudos, for making a effort to release their archived caches, wherever they may be stored due to data retention policies.
I have a huge soft spot for projects where you can get the most happening because you are not required to jump a known hurdle to usefully contribute.
Overnight I was fretting with the necessity of sorting out any residual legal issues that might attach to digging out old cache dumps.
But forgetting the fact that the very same companies are commonly invested in just the tech to sort out the problem,.
Problem being one which can present all kinds of ways.
Do you have any chance of finding adult content in your cache?
Do you care about how much you are seen surfing the competition's websites?
Will URLs reveal that anonymous forum login from 2002, slagging your rivals benchmarking?
Did you put Squid on your intranet or webmaster, without https because your predecessor thought it was on the non routeing private range?
Did you use DNS in any way to point to document resources that are accessible to users via the proxy server and Squid?
Anyhow lots of data protection suites have been used to purge archives and remove any trace of activity or files best kept private.
That's how the latest HDS kit is sold : cluster FS with hyperconverged local nodes crunching security, audit and search results.
I'm sure I'm only wishing on a prayer that you can find great troves for redecorating the empty space that the WWW once pointed to.
But imagine that we really could fill enough gaps in the dead link forests!
Even just attempting could be a superb way to promote your storage products and bless your customers who offer up the raw stores with lots of great ways to engage regular journalists with the subject.
I totally live best effort projects, and especially the ambitious culturally interesting ones.
So does Joe Public.
I'm in.
Where do we start?
(if I have the time, I'm quite serious about this, my profession is advertising not online but the traditional way of doing it. I have just got my head back from exploding with the multitude of ways to sell, promote, demo, boast, reminisce, predict, forecast, warn people about how society will crumble without personal all flash arrays... Last one might be pushing it a bit, but I see a fantastic deal of business on the back of the idea. It's beautiful because everyone is invited to participate, no vendor or company is locked out. So the public is not getting the boring official line and canned quotes. This is real people showing the technology but showing the extent to which we discard valuable culture. For thousands of years mankind grew as our means of recording documentation and thought and expression grew. Look now how easily we will throw it all away!!!! I know we can do better.
One way to look at it is emphasizing the power of link rot. These links typically cost dozens or hundreds of dollars to put in a single link in the MDH, up to the max of $37k; the linkers were motivated and knew that much of the value was in having a valid link to click on. But barely a decade on, even this isn't enough for a majority of links to still work. Interests are too ephemeral, people move on too much, control of domains and hosting are too hard to maintain, even when you are paying thousands of dollars. Linkrot is inevitable.
I actually purchased a $300 spot on this. I did get quite a few clicks, but very low-quality traffic. Mostly, I got lots of offers from copycat sites to join their "billion dollar" homepage or whatnot.
It's crazy how many copycats came out, very unoriginal thinking going on.
I too bought, about $800, at the bottom right, to place the words "Million Dollar Script". The script cost $50 a pop, and allowed you to make a self-hosted copycat site.
I was quite busy for the next few months as orders kept rushing in!
I've also had a few competitors pop up & the script was pirated, including some selling it on ebay, they even forgot to remove my contact email, so their customers were coming to me for support.
Eventually, the fad died down, but it got a lot of business out of those 800 pixels.
Thanks Alex, if you're reading this, for the original idea & letting my ad on your site.
> It's crazy how many copycats came out, very unoriginal thinking going on.
Any successful thing on the internet that hits the media will sooner or later be copied (usually sooner). Remember 'awesomenessreminders.com', the story had barely been told or the first copycats were up. And that was the HN audience doing the copying.
> Any successful thing on the internet that hits the media will sooner or later be copied (usually sooner)
Definitely not copied from anotheer commenter ;)
I keep a list of things that follow this pattern, and yeah, altcoins/tokens are another. It really just becomes a catalogue of what's been popular/happening these past couple decades.
I think in many ways it is not a 'decaying digital artifact' as it is an excellent representation of the fallacy upon which a lot of the Internet hangs. In the Library of Alexandria you didn't have scrolls disappear because the kingdom where they originated had been crushed under the boot of an invader. But the Internet is no great library, no respository of knowledge, or an oasis of independent thought. The Internet is a conversation in a crowded room with amplified shotgun microphones pointed at all who walk through it.
The library burned down, iirc. Largely due to societal rot as you suggest--invasions, pestilence, and probably the deaths of the original founders and their vision did not translate to the following generations.
I think all the broken links just goes to show that failure in business is the norm or that someone who thought it would be a good idea to promote their company on this service is probably not good at running business.
Would be interesting to know how many people on the million dollar homepage are on HN. I imagine there's a wonderful cross over between the two groups.
Even though its with a business we're not doing now, my business partner and I are on there.
Edit: don't think it deserves a downvote - is it not an interesting question? I bet there are loads of serial entrepreneurs on both
FWIW, I'm building https://PageDash.com as a private web archive to address the problem of link rot, beginning from a personal level. Launching in late August. Think of it as a private version of perma.cc.
perma.cc? Wow. Thank you for not trying to establish a permanent namespace in a vanity ccTLD with a tenuous relationship to some privately-held company.
if you don't mind me asking for your opinion, what about using vanity TLD for shortened URLs for PageDash? e.g. bit.ly, goo.gl, amzn.to, etc. Would you be cool with that, and if not, why not?
"Cool URIs don't change." Link rot is the biggest threat to the World-Wide Web. In my view it's irresponsible to issue a URL without being confident I can keep it available at least as long as the document exists. I don't have that kind of confidence in the government of Libya or Tonga decades from now.
I'm also not a big fan of redirections that cross failure domains, just because they make the web slower and less reliable.
I just heard about the "Million Dollar Homepage" for the first time last week. Would this idea (or one like it) work today? Making a million dollars for something so bizarre, fun, and straightforward sounds amazing. Can anyone reference other attempts at similar ideas?
It's just a random example of something silly going viral. Stuff like this definately could work today (potato salad kickstarter was a thing) but any individuals attempt probably wouldn't work, it mostly comes down to luck.
Cards Against Humanity raises $100,000 to dig 'tremendous hole'
Makers of party game livestream a backhoe digging a gigantic hole somewhere in the US, saying ‘as long as money keeps coming in, we’ll keep digging’
The kid tried to do it again. It didn't work. The reason it worked the first time was people bought it out of curiosity then it went viral over traditional news media and then original purchasers reaped profits leading to further hype leading to further buying craze leading to further frenzy.
Eventually the last bit of 1000 pixels went for 37k.
If the kid had extended the page another million pixels, you could have measured the peak interest and the subsequent decline.
>Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room
but then supports a candidate that denies climate change and replaces scientists in government positions with company stooges. Never understood Thiel.
Köln created a website where people were able to buy pixels of an image of Podolski for €25 per 8x8 pixel square, in order to gather €1 million to reduce the cost of the transfer;[1][2] Formula One driver and Köln supporter Michael Schumacher bought several pixels for €875.[3]
BitCoin, where the inventor managed to convince people to accept a new currency, mined the first few blocks of it, and ended up with a billion dollars in paper wealth as a result.
By that logic all fiat currencies and even some commodities like diamond and gold(whose usefulness from an industrial perspective doesn't match their market value) would fit the bill.
There was a post on Hacker News several months ago to a site that posted the last five people who paid for advertising. The list made it to about $500 before the admins here shut it down.
TWiT ("This Week In Tech") / Leo Laporte did something similar to partly fund his original move from the "Cottage" to their new "Brickhouse" studios in 2011 by selling bricks on a wall.
I couldn't quickly find information about how much they cost or he raised, though googling reveals multiple companies that will sell engraved bricks to power your fundraiser.
Fun, well, that's a matter of taste so I won't debate you there.
But "fairly straightforward"? Let's not get crazy, here. IMO, ICOs are doing to cryptocurrency what derivatives did to traditional investing. Abstraction, indirection, and confusion, all to make a buck...
I've read a lot about ICOs and I still don't understand what's going on. I can't even tell what people are actually buying (like EOS, where it explicitly says the tokens are worthless and not convertible). An even bigger question is why people are throwing so much money on them when it's so unclear what you're getting.
It probably makes more sense when you realize that many ICO buyers are "whales", big cryptocurrency holders who bought in when the currencies were much cheaper and amassed large amounts. When the news headline says an ICO raised $180M, that doesn't actually mean people spent $180M on tokens. Rather, they converted $180M of Ethereum, at its current valuation, which they may have purchased for say $1M collectively. The individual holders might not actually be spending more than $5-10K of their own money (or possibly nothing, if they got their ether through mining), but that money has appreciated to be worth say $1M at Ethereum's current value.
It's a good example of a double pyramid scheme. The value of Ethereum is itself going up; it was worthless 4 years ago but now has a market cap of $20B. And then you can "spend" Ethereum to get additional tokens out of an ICO, which means that you're buying into another pyramid scheme with tokens which themselves have appreciated. The huge dollar values, after the double conversion, generate great news stories, which inspire more people to buy into Ethereum, which prop its value up even more, which mean that the companies who did ICOs can convert their cryptocurrency to dollars at better rates and inflate their dollar values even more, which inspires more ICOs at bigger valuations, and so on.
Lest this sound too dodgy, remember that all currency is itself a pyramid scheme: it's inherently worthless, and worth only what peoples' expectations of its future valuation will be. So the endgame for cryptocurrencies is either they run out of hard-currency buyers, in which case their value comes crashing down and everyone who bought in loses everything, or they replace the dollar as the world reserve currency and everyone who didn't buy in loses everything. I think the latter option is unlikely, but also underpriced, in the sense that it's more likely than most people give it credit for.
I agree with you where you say that currencies are worth only what peoples' expectations of its future valuation will be, but that is basically a mechanism for valuing anything - not a description of a pyramid scheme.
A pyramid scheme is one where there is a continued and ongoing transfer of wealth from new scheme joiners to earlier scheme joiners, which works great until the supply of new joiners dries up - then the thing collapses.
A new currency could work (in theory) absolutely fine with no further issuance, and no new joiners beyond the first round of adopters - not at all the same as a pyramid scheme.
I keep seeing the fallacy that all currency value is based on future expectations.
Here's a thought experiment... in the US, work full time while getting paid in Bitcoin. Make all transactions in Bitcoin. At the end of the year you'll need to file a tax return. Your final options are:
1. Buy some USD to pay your taxes.
2. Go to jail.
Demand for fiat currencies is ultimately underpinned by them being the only instrument accepted for payment of taxes.
Here you describe a good reason why people need USD - indeed another currency or asset class cannot be used to pay US taxes. But its not clear to me why this means valuing currencies on future expectations is a fallacy? It just means that US taxpayers will need US dollars at tax payment time.
You have a third option: 3. Don't pay taxes. Live like an outlaw. Shoot the tax collector.
You're driving at an important point that I want to take a bit further. Ultimately, the "backing" of a fiat currency comes from the barrel of a gun. People continue to use U.S. dollars because the U.S. has the strongest military on earth right now. Same throughout history - the backing of the British pound came from the British Navy, and when the British military collapsed post-WW2, the pound sterling didn't last much longer.
A major adoption driver for cryptocurrencies has been the weakness of central governments. We've seen this most with China, where wealthy Chinese businessmen are eager to take money out of the country in any way possible. But the most likely tipping point that would drive widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies would be if the perception became widespread that the U.S. government could no longer guarantee physical security; if, for example, we "lost" the war on terrorism. You could easily imagine people "hiring" personal drones or robots for protection with BitCoin if this came to pass, to fill the vacuum of the state security apparatus.
If the US and other national governments collapsed then every cryptocurrency would become worthless (Gas Town isn't going to accept your "money") or less than worthless (Thunderdome is going to eliminate you because your mining rig wastes valuable electricity).
Maybe. My bet is that economic activity wouldn't cease in the absence of nation-states, but rather some other institution(s) would arise that currently perform the function of nation-states: physical security, dispute resolution, identity symbolism, monetary authority, etc. Cryptocurrencies have the advantage of already existing here, but there's certainly the possibility that it could be some yet-to-be-invented institution.
Man, I must have been a real idiot to not get a VC to say yes in 2016. Worth noting that it seemed, at the time, like there was less interest in seed rounds (especially after Twitter's decline) and more in Series A,B, etc.
reddit's recent April Fool's experiment. They had a blank 10,000x10,000px (?) canvas where people could manipulate 1 pixel at a time with time constraints. No money involved, but seeing the panoply of different subcultures come together was unbelievably fascinating.
"Million Dollar Cat Billboard project sells 10 000 “squares” (places on a billboard) $100 dollars each to make world’s first ever cat billboard and put it up in 10 cities around the globe for a month. To proudly show your cat to the world you need to buy at least one square. But of course you can buy as many of them as you wish as long as they are available."
It's amazing how well designed the ads within the image are...it's a big jumble but many of them stand out quite strongly with just a single word. I wonder if they designed ads with the surrounding color context taken into account.
I wonder how he got everything to fit as more and more space was sold and if it was a manual process? It must have been like playing Tetris on expert mode.
Edit: looks like the million dollar homepage is probably a bit more complicated than 2d knapsack, somewhat like tetris.
Another edit: looks like the only non-rectangular space sold on the million dollar homepage was the last space (as specified in the top linked article). So perhaps 2d knapsack is appropriate. It's late here.
The way it worked was that as you bought, you could select the region that you wanted. You would be charged based on the number of pixels in the region.
I actually have seen the server that it was on. The hosting company provided free hosting to it for several years (at least 8 IIRC). I think that at some point the server died and Alex Tew decided to move elsewhere.
At one point, he had the million dollar pixel lotto which was the same idea except at two dollars per pixel and one person who clicked on one of the pixels would get half the money that came in.
So it was like buying tickets online? if multiple people were interested in the same region, the one which payment went through first got the region? However, this must still have been chaotic once the interest started to rise as space would seem empty until the payment was confirmed, and others would try to buy in the meantime. I guess you would also just have to make a rough estimate on the design of your banner and just buy the space, no time to design it first.
After some research I'm now able to provide an answer to my own question.
The canvas was partitoned into blocks of 10x10 pixels that was white until sold. You would make a payment for X number of blocks through 2Checkout or PayPal. After transferring the money, you would send an e-mail to Alex Tew with the image, coordinates of wanted blocks, URL and TITLE/ALT text. He would then confirm the payment and upload your banner within 48 hours.
So the entire operation was manual with orders placed by e-mail.
For the record, in 2005 I told him about Million Dollar Homepage, and he was angry that someone could get rich off such a stupid idea when so many others fail.
Whatever happened to DOI? (Or leveraging Google's knowledge of redirects?) A lot of rot is hosting changes; the documents, if the author cared, could well be hosted somewhere else.
Are you referring to Digital Object Identifiers? If so, they are still being used. I've only seen it be utilized for scientific research data though - check out datacite.org
1780/2816 links being reachable is actually much higher than I'd expect over 12 years. I'm not sure if that's what I would have predicted from the outset.
That guy made a nice bundle off the idea, it got picked up and hyped by the media so much I'm sure the companies that bought in got some ROI, or at least some publicity. Such was the extent of the dot com bubble that this sort of nonsense could happen and everyone cheered...
I wonder what the "rot factor" is for scientific citations? Some professional societies I am in mandate URLs for bibliographical references. Most of the time these are peer-reviewed articles. But they can be softer references like Wiki reviews, data repositories, etc.
I've often encountered a sort of "reverse link rot" where a cited article is in another language or obscure journal or reference material that was never digitized and is inaccessible.
He promised to keep it up for 5 years. After 5 years, the site had zero traffic, and there was no point of keeping it up. Also, links started going dry at that point with original owners no longer caring.
I can't currently access the article at https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2017/07/21/a-million-squand...
[Insert joke about irony here.]