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The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
- _kst_ 9y agoI can still access http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ I can't currently access the article at https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2017/07/21/a-million-squandered-the-million-dollar-homepage-as-a-decaying-digital-artifact/ https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2017/07/21/a-million-squand... [Insert joke about irony here.]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- johnbowers112 9y agoArchive here! https://perma.cc/A6ZZ-79X6 https://perma.cc/A6ZZ-79X6
- diminish 9y agoI think the Harvard link is down due to traffic.
- Pharylon 9y agoI'm sure the Million Dollar Homepage is getting a lot of traffic right now too
- krallja 9y agoThe 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.
- URSpider94 9y agoIt'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).
- sandra7676 9y agoI'm making over $15k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. Read more on this web site...ＷＷＷ.joinmate2.ℭom
- justadeveloper2 9y agoLibrarians 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. It's a cool article, nonetheless.
- gscott 9y agoSame as if I drive down a street ten years later... I can't expect the street to be a time-capsule to mt memories.
- concede_pluto 9y agoOld 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- brosky117 9y agoI 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?
- krallja 9y agoInitial Coin Offerings are bizarre, fairly straightforward and can be fun.
- zzalpha 9y agoBizarre I'll give you. 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...
- Kiro 9y ago> fairly straightforward 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.
- nostrademons 9y agoIt 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.
- resf 9y agoDecaying 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)). */ I guess someone didn't keep backups?
- voltagex_ 9y agoOr just a way to shore up dependencies
- sandra7676 9y agoStart working at home with Google! It’s by-far the best job I've had. Last Wednesday I got a brand new BMW since getting a check for $6570 this - 4 weeks past. I began this 6-months ago and immediately was bringing home at least $98 per hour. Go to this website and go to tech tab to start your work.......
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoOh, so that's why the Twitter follow button has archive.org as the referer!
- haser_au 9y agoEither 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.
- cornstalks 9y agoThat doesn't seem to be the case: curl -v http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/index_files/widgets.js 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.
- philip4534 9y agoXanadu lost.
- zandorg 9y agoI know Ted Nelson of Xanadu. 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.
- johnchristopher 9y agoMandatory posting of one of the best wired article ever: https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
- fatjokes 9y agoI didn't realize you bought the pixels permanently. How did the owner keep up with serving costs?
- Dylan16807 9y agoIt's a million dollars. Even if it cost a thousand dollars a month to host, you could pay that with ~1% interest on the money. And realistically it's something that after the initial craze cools, can run on quite cheap hosting.
- nashashmi 9y agoHe 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.
- ernsheong 9y agoFWIW, I'm building https://PageDash.com 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.
- elektor 9y agoVery cool, I'm definitely interested in signing up when you launch this!
- concede_pluto 9y agoperma.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.
- ernsheong 9y agoif 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?
- concede_pluto 9y ago"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.
- Danihan 9y agolol, you found your domain on impossibility, didn't you.
- always_good 9y ago
- amelius 9y agoThis homepage demonstrates what an average city would look like without any regulation.
- narrator 9y agoI 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.
- cdevs 9y agoMy first web page ever is in there. I'm not sure how special of a thing that is I don't know how many icons are involved. Also I wonder how Word got around to me about things like this in the days of MySpace and yahoo as my internet.
- glenstein 9y agoThe 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.
- twblalock 9y agoI 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.
- gcb0 9y agothat'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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- aidos 9y agoWould 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
- petepete 9y agoA company I used to work for are right up in the top left, Cartridge Save.
- hambast 9y agoHa. Also worked for Cartridge Save. Remember them buying those pixels.
- dan1234 9y agoPretty sure the owner of "Ling's Cars" has posted here before. On the million dollar homepage, she has the face just under the Union flag.
- Houshalter 9y agoGwern has a good summary of the research in this: https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs >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).
- minikites 9y agoPinboard sees similar effects: https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/501406303747457024 https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/501406303747457024
- Animats 9y agoThere'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.
- 9y ago
- johnbowers112 9y agoThere's an archive of the article available here: https://perma.cc/A6ZZ-79X6 https://perma.cc/A6ZZ-79X6
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- AdmiralAsshat 9y agoI'm not sure why the article considers it "squandered": it did its job as long as the advertisers cared to maintain their links. It hardly seems fair to blame a billboard being in disrepair if the company it advertised no longer exists.
- peter303 9y agoI 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.
- Pulcinella 9y agoDOIs are "suppose" to help solve this problem. 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.
- Deimorz 9y agoThere are some info/studies about it linked here that show it's fairly high: https://perma.cc/#landing-problem https://perma.cc/#landing-problem Perma.cc was created by the Harvard Law School Library specifically to try to solve that issue, since so many citation links were becoming useless.
- pishpash 9y agoWhatever 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.
- ccoggins 9y agoAre 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
- raattgift 9y agoDOI is still there; in fact one might say that it's sci-hub and not google that has made DOI actually useful.
- sixQuarks 9y agoI 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.
- jlangenauer 9y agoI remember that time - there were even people trying to sell guides purporting to teach people how to set up their own million-dollar homepage!
- sixQuarks 9y agosimilar thing happened with Groupon.
- vanviegen 9y agos/million-dollar homepage/altcoin/g
- nebabyte 9y ago> 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.
- fpoling 9y agoLike the saying that to make money on Forex one should give lectures how to make money on Forex.
- jacquesm 9y ago> 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.
- johnbowers112 9y agoHere's an archive of the article for those having trouble accessing it: https://perma.cc/A6ZZ-79X6 https://perma.cc/A6ZZ-79X6
- Nursie 9y agoOh wow, I remember that. 1 million pixels for only a dollar each! 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...
- braeckmansj 9y agoDo you know that you can hack any ATM machine !!! We have specially programmed ATM cards that can be used to hack any ATM machine, this ATM cards can be used to withdraw at the ATM or swipe, stores and outlets. We sell this cards to all our customers and interested buyers worldwide, the cards has a daily withdrawal limit of $5000 in ATM and up to $50,000 spending limit in stores. and also if you in need of any other cyber hacking services, we are here for you at any time any day. Here is our price list for ATM cards: BALANCE PRICE $2,500----------------$150 $5,000----------------$300 $10,000 ------------- $650 $20,000 ------------- $1,200 $35,000 --------------$1,900 $50,000 ------------- $2,700 $100,000------------- $5,200 The price include shipping fees,order now: via email...braeckmansj@outlook.com.... you can also call or whatsapp us with this mobile number..+2348114499350
- Gargoyle 9y agoDo this with an ICO, with your space verified via smart contract. It's all in the marketing!
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mathattack 9y agoYes - and a different economic model for maintenance than the Library of Alexandria. In this case, the library didn't fail. The ecosystem around it did.
- justadeveloper2 9y agoThe 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.
- smegel 9y agoIt'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.
- hellbanner 9y agoA more modern variant, https://catbillboard.wordpress.com/ https://catbillboard.wordpress.com/ "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."
- schiffern 9y ago>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: http://paid http://paid & reserved/ http:// http:// paid and reserved - accent designer clothing/ http://reserved http://reserved for edna moran/ http://paid http://paid & reserved for paul tarquinio/ (1200 pixels) http://pending http://pending order/ 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.
- malthazzar 9y agothe left of the yellow coupons ad in the right middle
- malthazzar 9y agothe left of the yellow coupons ad in the right middle
- keyboardmonkey 9y agoit was always destined to decay, was always going to be a one-off success. interesting in it's success juxtaposed by its immediate pointlessness.
- rxlim 9y agoI 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.
- mkingston 9y agoThe problem is, I think, the 2d knapsack problem. In case it's of interest: https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/1478/algorithms-for-two-and-three-dimensional-knapsack https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/1478/algorithms-for-t... 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.
- ajosh 9y agoThe 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.
- rxlim 9y agoSo 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.
- rxlim 9y agoAfter 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.
- chenster 9y agoI'm just jealous.
- tejtm 9y agoAs good a time as any to trot out my hobby horse with suggestions on how to mitigate data rot. Aimed at science, but more broadly applicable. "Identifiers for the 21st century" https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001414 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001414 note/claimer/disclaimer: Although I am included as an author I do not write that well.
- mathattack 9y ago1780/2816 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.
- 5_minutes 9y agoAn interview with the creator would've been a nice addition to the story.
- mavhc 9y agoAll the links except twitter on the homepage are broken
- pul 9y agoWorst of all, only 8 of the 3306 links use https. 11 years really is an eternity in internet years.
- Shorel 9y agoEverytime I find something interesting, it goes to Pocket. That provides me with a digital copy, and it is automatically sync with my Kobo reader.