In 2005, student Alex Tew had a million-dollar brainwave.

The 20-year-old was playing around with ideas to pay for a looming three-year business degree; Tew was already worrying that the overdraft he had would mushroom. So he scribbled on a pad: “How to become a millionaire.”

Twenty minutes later he had what he thought was the answer.

Tew set up a website called the Million Dollar Homepage. The site’s model was almost obscenely simple: on it was a million pixels of ad space, the pixels available to buy in blocks of 100 at $1 a pixel. Once you bought them they were yours forever. When the millionth pixel was sold, Tew would be a millionaire. At least, that was the plan.

The Million Dollar Homepage launched on 26 August 2005, after Tew had spent the grand sum of 50 euros on registering the domain and setting up the hosting. Advertisers bought pixels and provided a link, tiny image and a short amount of text for when the cursor hovered over their image.

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After little more than a month, thanks to word-of-mouth and ever-increasing media attention, Tew’s homepage had raised more than $250,000 (£140,000). In January 2006, the last 1,000 pixels were sold at auction for $38,100 (£21,500); Tew had indeed made his million.

The Million Dollar Homepage is still online, nearly a decade and a half after it was created. Many of the customers – which included the likes of the UK’s The Times newspaper, travel service Cheapflights.com, online portal Yahoo! and rock duo Tenacious D – have had 15 years of advertising off that one-off payment. The site still has several thousand viewers every day; it has probably been a very good investment.