I think the distinction is real, even though technically both are advertising.
A normal ad
Pay $100 → receive ~10,000 impressions.
A pixel site
Pay $100 → own these 100 little squares on this weird internet artifact.
The second feels more like a money-making scheme because the site's way of making money is also the entire product.
Monetized internet experiments
I'd put them somewhere between advertising, collectibles, games, and stunts. The Million Dollar Homepage is the original. The pixels were technically ads — you put an image and a link there — but nobody was really doing pixel price → impressions → clicks → CAC → ROI.
People bought because buying a piece of the thing was fun. The pitch wasn't really "we have valuable web traffic; advertise with us." It was:
There are exactly one million pixels. They're $1 each. What happens if people buy them all?
And the creator's desired outcome is sitting right there in the premise: 1,000,000 pixels × $1 = $1,000,000. That's what gives it the money-grab / money-making-experiment feeling.
A few ingredients
01
Arbitrary scarcity
There's no physical reason there can only be a million pixels, 400 squares, or 100 leaderboard spots. The creator just makes that up.
02
Transparent monetization
The transaction isn't hidden behind SaaS pricing or ad CPMs. Giving the creator money is the mechanic.
03
Participation is public
Your purchase becomes part of the thing. You're not just a customer. You're on the board now.
04
Questionable intrinsic value
The ad might get clicks, but that's almost beside the point. You're buying because this is a thing people are buying.
05
Success makes it more desirable
People buy → the board fills → filling becomes interesting → people talk about it → traffic goes up → leftover spots look better → more people buy.
Number five is the interesting one. A normal ad platform needs an audience before the inventory is worth anything. These things can bootstrap themselves. That's why they can feel almost Ponzi-ish without actually being a Ponzi scheme. Early buyers help create the attention that makes later buyers want in. But nobody's promised a return, and later people's money doesn't have to get paid out to earlier people.
"Advertising" undersells what people are buying
I think there are actually three products bundled together.
Advertising
“Click my square and visit my website.”
Status / collectibility
“I own square #37 on this internet thing.”
Participation
“I was part of this ridiculous experiment.”
That last one matters a lot. Someone spending $100 on Google Ads expects $100 of economic value back. Someone spending $100 on the Million Dollar Homepage could be totally happy saying, "lol, we bought 100 pixels on that Million Dollar Homepage thing." That's closer to buying a brick with your name on it at a fundraiser than buying banner ads.
Then the later ones take the mask off
Million Dollar Homepage 2005
Give me money and I'll give you pixels that happen to advertise you.
Buy a Pixel 2023
Give me money and claim one of these made-up scarce spots.
highscore.money 2016
Give me money and I'll publicly show that you gave me more money than other people.
Outbid now
Give me more money than the last person and take their spot.
By the end, you don't even need the advertising story anymore. The money itself becomes the game.
Marc, who made highscore.money, wrote this about why Outbid took off:
Read on XReally interesting to see @jonathan_wilke's success with outbid.lol
I first saw it when someone tagged me as it looked similar to my highscore.money. And while conceptually alike, I think there's some important differences that made his way more successful:
1) Outbid.lol's execution is simply better. B2B-first positioning (versus my philosophical art project approach), it shows the product value (number of clicks received), designed it like a product discovery platform (so makers are already used to adding their product), and you can increase your existing bid which I never ended up implementing meaning it's hard to get a proper bidding war going.
2) His timing is perfect. I launched highscore.money in 2016 which was Product Hunt's heyday and distribution wasn't as much of a pain point. Today however, everyone is struggling for attention. Outbid.lol is a perfect "just throw some money at the problem" solution. And while it may not be a long term acquisition channel, it's a fun way to be part of a meme and get some traffic.
Seeing all the clones pop up now is funny, but I think the more interesting lesson isn't "build another bidding site." It's to try weird ideas like this in the first place.
Don't overthink it. Ship things. It's impossible to predict what will work. So just have some fun.
A running list
Same pattern, different costumes. Pixel sites, pay-to-rank boards, onchain tiles, and one local cork-board version.
2005 · Pixel billboard · Sold out
The Million Dollar Homepage
The original. 1,000,000 pixels × $1 = $1,000,000.
Alex Tew sold a million pixels for a dollar each to pay for school. You got a tiny image, a link, and a hover slogan. On paper it was advertising, but nobody was sitting there doing pixel price → impressions → clicks → CAC → ROI. People bought because buying a piece of the thing was fun. It turned into a little internet time capsule, and he ended up making about $1,037,100.
- Inventory
- 1,000,000 pixels
- Price
- $1 / pixel
- Gross
- ~$1.04M
2016 · Owned tiles · Tradeable
PixelMap
Same idea, except you owned the square and could resell it.
Ken Erwin put this on Ethereum in 2016, years before NFTs even had a standard. About 4,000 tiles, 16×16 each, 2 ETH to start. You could change the image, change the link, or sell the tile to someone else. That's the interesting part. Not the billboard. The fact that the little square was actually yours.
- Tiles
- 3,969
- Launch price
- 2 ETH / tile
- Secondary
- Later resale market
2016 · Pay-to-rank · Live
highscore.money
The score is just how much you paid.
Marc Köhlbrugge took this to its logical end: the leaderboard is ranked by who paid more. No pixels. No logo. No ROI story. You pay, your name goes on the board, and the money is the game. It shipped in 2016, and now even software agents can pay to post a score.
- Minimum
- $25
- Recent total
- ~$5.5k paid
- Onchain cousin
- pay.game
2021 · Pay-to-rank · Live
Pay.Game
highscore.money, but on Ethereum. Whatever you pay is your score.
Same game, now a smart contract. You pay some ETH, that amount is your score, and the board is public. Nobody has to pretend this is ad inventory anymore. The money is the whole point.
- Mechanic
- Pay = score
- Chain
- Ethereum
- Live board
- < 1 ETH total
2022 · Pixel billboard · Sold out
ThetaMillion
A million pixels at 1 TFUEL each. Filled up in four days.
A Theta hackathon project. 1 TFUEL per pixel, spots minted as NFTs, board full in four days. If a million pixels really went at 1 TFUEL each, that's 1,000,000 TFUEL. The dollar amount depends a lot on when people paid. At $0.05 that's $50k. At $0.10 it's $100k. At $0.28 it's $284k. This sold in 2022, not during the 2021 boom, so I'd guess closer to $50k–$100k than $280k.
- Price
- 1 TFUEL / pixel
- Fill time
- 4 days
- USD guess
- ~$50k–$100k
2023 · Pixel billboard · Sold out
Buy a Pixel
A 20×20 board that still sold out.
Constant built this in about eight hours after a Discord joke wouldn't leave him alone. Stripe, pick a pixel, stick an image and a link on it. They launched on Product Hunt, hit #4 for the day, and the whole 20×20 grid sold out. Then he sold the boilerplate and left the board up.
- Grid
- 20×20
- Launch
- Product Hunt #4
- Status
- 0 pixels left
2023– · Pixel billboard · Selling
Million Bit Homepage
Price goes up as more people mint. 87,296 pixels sold after relaunch.
Onchain remake of the original. Pixel price goes up with each minted plot, which is the bootstrap loop made obvious: early buyers help make later spots more expensive. Shortly after relaunch, 87,296 pixels sold. I'd shorthand the gross as ~4 ETH. If ETH was around $2,500–$3,500 at the time, that's roughly $10k–$14k.
- Sold
- 87,296 pixels
- Gross
- ~4 ETH
- USD guess
- ~$10k–$14k
now · Pay-to-rank · Live
Outbid
Pay more than the last person and take their spot.
A ranked list of sites and handles. Your bid is your rank. Pay less than #1 and you still land somewhere. Already on the list? Put in the same URL and pay more. There's still a product link on each row, but that's not really the game. The money is the ranking algorithm.
- Mechanic
- Bid for rank
- Recent #1
- ~$1,000+
- Rule
- Pay $1 more to take it
now · Local boards · Live
LocalSquare
Same idea, but every town gets a cork board.
Each town gets a 10×10 digital bulletin board. Businesses pin a visual ad from $1 a square a month. Pins last 30 days, you can auto-renew, and 10% goes to charity. This is the closest one to normal local advertising, but you're still paying to claim a square on a public grid. Less “own a piece of internet history,” more “the cork board at the grocery store, except it bills monthly.”
- Grid
- 10×10 per town
- Price
- $1 / square / month
- Term
- 30-day pins
The common DNA
Make up a limited digital thing. Let people buy pieces of it. Show who bought what. Hope the act of selling it gets interesting enough that it sells itself.
Call them pay-to-participate internet stunts, monetized internet experiments, or maybe the most accurate name: artificially scarce internet real estate. That's the common DNA connecting the pixel sites, highscore.money, Outbid, and the rest.