The Million Dollar Homepage, but for words
In 2005 a student named Alex Tew put a million pixels on one page at a dollar each and sold every one of them inside five months. It worked once, perfectly, and it has been imitated badly ever since — usually by rebuilding the same grid and waiting for 2005 to happen again.
The thing the imitations copy is the grid. The thing that actually made it work was scarcity you could see: a page visibly filling up, with a number attached. And the thing that killed it was baked into the same design — once the last pixel sold, there was nothing left to watch. The page has not changed since 2006, and a large share of those tiny logos now link to companies that no longer exist.
ownaword keeps the visible scarcity and removes the ending. There are 100 words rather than a million pixels, and no word is ever sold for the last time: whoever wins one holds it for good, and nobody can pay more than they did.
| Million Dollar Homepage | ownaword | |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | A 10x10 block of pixels holding a favicon-sized logo | A whole word: its page, your name and copy on the board, and a URL like ownaword.lol/seo |
| Inventory | 1,000,000 pixels, all sold by 2006 | 100 words, every one of them always available to whoever pays most |
| Price | $1 per pixel, fixed, minimum $100 | Opens at $25–$100 and rises with every sale — the price of a word never goes down |
| How long you keep it | Forever, in principle | Permanent. Auctioned once, then never for sale again |
| Can somebody take it | No | Yes, and that is the product. A competitor taking your word is the thing that makes the word worth holding |
| What happens after it sells out | Nothing. The page freezes and the links rot | It cannot sell out. A word changing hands is the event the whole site is built to show |
| Why anyone looks at it | Novelty, in 2005 | A live price ladder, public ownership history, and companies taking words off each other in public |
Which one is the better deal for a buyer
Honestly: it depends on what you want from it. A pixel block bought in 2005 is still there twenty years later, which no word here can promise. If what you want is a placement nobody can ever take away, a fixed-price permanent slot is a better shape than an auction, and this is the wrong site.
What a permanent slot cannot give you is attention after the day you buy it. The Million Dollar Homepage sent enormous traffic in 2005 and effectively none since, because there was no reason to return to a page that never changes. A word that can be taken has a reason to be checked: it has a price that moves, a rival who wants it, and a public record of everyone who held it before you.
Questions
- What was the Million Dollar Homepage?
- A single web page built in 2005 by Alex Tew, a British student who wanted to pay for university. It was a 1000x1000 grid of one million pixels sold at one dollar each, in blocks of ten by ten, with each block carrying a tiny logo linking to the buyer's site. It sold out in about five months and raised roughly a million dollars.
- Can you still buy pixels on the Million Dollar Homepage?
- No. Every pixel was sold in 2005 and 2006 and the placements were permanent, so the grid has not changed since. A large share of the links now point at sites that no longer exist.
- How is ownaword different?
- It sells 100 words rather than a million pixels, and a word is something people say and search for rather than a dot in a grid. Each one is auctioned once and held permanently, the same as a pixel was. The difference is what the slot does afterwards: the page stays live, the clicks out are counted, and a quarter of every sale buys advertising that points back at the words already owned.
- Do you own the word after you buy it?
- You own a display slot on this site: your name, a line of copy, a logo and a vanity URL on that word's page and on the board, won at auction and held permanently. It is not a trademark and grants no rights over the word anywhere else.
- What does a word cost?
- Every word carries a reserve between $25 and $100 depending on how contested the category is, and bidding opens well under it. Each bid has to beat the one before it by at least $5 or 10%, whichever is larger. What a word finally costs is whatever the last bidder was willing to pay.
See all 100 words and what they cost →·And the 2026 version of the same idea