Is the Million Dollar Homepage still online?

Yes. It has been up since 26 August 2005. But a large share of the links it sold are dead — link rot was already widespread by 2017. The page survived; most of what it sold did not.

Do pixel ads still work?

As a way to be seen by the people looking at the board, yes — that is all any placement on any site is. As a way to buy traffic or rankings, no. A pixel ad is a spot on a page, not a channel: if nobody visits the board, nobody sees your square.

Do I get a dofollow link from tilesquat?

No. Every outbound link carries rel="sponsored", on the board and on each tile page. We do not sell links that pass ranking signals, at any price. What you buy is a placement people can see and click, not an SEO shortcut.

What happens if someone takes my tile?

They pay 1.5× your tile’s current heat, never less than the floor, and it becomes theirs immediately. There is no refund. You are renting the position with heat, not buying the square.

the block / pixel ads

Pixel ads, 21 years after the Million Dollar Homepage.

A grid of small paid squares is one of the oldest ad formats on the web. It also has one flaw that nobody fixed for two decades: what happens to a square when the link on it dies.

What pixel advertising is

Pixel advertising sells a small fixed square on a web page — a logo, a link, often a line of text — for a one-off price. The page is a grid. The price is usually flat. What you buy is a spot on it, and the grid itself is the product: the whole point is seeing who else is on the wall.

The format is 21 years old and still running in roughly the shape it was invented in, which is unusual for anything on the web.

What the Million Dollar Homepage actually did

Alex Tew launched it on 26 August 2005. One million pixels in a 1,000 × 1,000 grid, sold at $1 a pixel in 10 × 10 blocks, so $100 bought you a visible square. He was 21 and trying to avoid a student loan.

It sold out in about five months. The last 1,000 pixels went to an eBay auction that closed at $38,100, bringing the gross to $1,037,100. Tew had spent roughly €50 on the domain and hosting.

Three things came out of that and are still true:

Attention can be cut into units small enough that a small business buys one on impulse.
A grid is a legible way to show who is in and who is not — the format explains itself.
The press covers a story it can see. The board was its own illustration.

Dates, prices and the eBay figure above come fromthe Wikipedia article on The Million Dollar Homepage, which cites the contemporaneous reporting. We did not buy anything from that site and it has no relationship with this one.

What it didn’t solve

Permanence. Tew promised the page would stay online for at least five years. It stayed up far longer than that. The ads did not: by 2017 a large share of the links were dead, and today much of the board is a museum of expired ones.

That is a structural problem, not a bug in one website. If you sell a square forever and take the money once, then:

nobody is paid to maintain it, so dead links stay up;
there is no mechanism to recycle the space when an advertiser disappears;
the board fills once, sells out, and has no second act.

The asset decays while the owner has no reason to look at it. Every clone since 2005 copied the pricing and the permanence, and permanence is the part that breaks.

What tilesquat does differently

Same idea, with the permanence removed. 1,000 tiles instead of a million pixels, and the floor price is $5 today.

Every tile carries heat, and heat halves every three days. A tile nobody tops up loses value on its own, whether or not anyone takes it.
Position is heat and nothing else. The hottest tile sits top-left. There are no featured slots and nothing to buy on the side.
Anyone can take a tile by paying 1.5× its current heat, never below the floor. The holder loses it immediately and gets no refund. That is the recycling mechanism the 2005 board never had: space moves to whoever values it now, and dead spots do not sit there forever.
Every outbound link is rel="sponsored". We do not sell links that pass ranking signals, at any price. Details are on therules page and in the terms.

What a tile buys — and what it doesn’t

You get:

a logo on a public board ordered by heat, which anyone can look at without signing up;
a page of its own that search engines can index, with your own words on it;
a public click count on that page, which you can check as often as you like;
a badge you can embed anywhere.

You do not get:

rankings. Sponsored links pass no ranking signal, so a tile will not move you up anything;
guaranteed traffic. You get a spot on a page; what that page receives is what you get a share of;
permanence. Heat decays and anyone can outpay you. That is the design, not a failure of it.

The honest version: if you want search rankings, buy a tile from nobody — go get links that someone chose to give you. If you want a visible, clickable spot that costs about as much as lunch and does not pretend to be anything else, this is that.

How to judge any pixel ad board

Five questions, all answerable before you pay:

Does the space ever recycle? If a link dies or an advertiser walks away, can the slot be sold again? If not, you are buying into a graveyard at whatever rate the other advertisers are dying off.
What happens when it sells out? A board with no second act stops being interesting the day it is full. Ask what you can buy on day 1,001.
Is the price fixed, laddered, or auctioned? A fixed price means early buyers and late buyers pay the same for very different value. A ladder says the last hundred cost more because by then the board has an audience.
Are the links sponsored or dofollow? If a board advertises dofollow links, understand what that means: Google’s link spam policy covers paid links that pass ranking signals, and the risk lands on the seller’s domain. When that domain is discounted, the buyer’s link is worth nothing either.
Is there anything on the page besides the grid? A board with no explanation, no rules and no data is a wall, not a product. You should be able to read what you are buying in under a minute.

You can run those five questions on tilesquat yourself:the rules answer 1 through 3,the numbers page answers what has actually happened so far, and the directory shows every tile and who holds it.

STILL WONDERING

Is the Million Dollar Homepage still online?: Yes. It has been up since 26 August 2005. But a large share of the links it sold are dead — link rot was already widespread by 2017. The page survived; most of what it sold did not.
Do pixel ads still work?: As a way to be seen by the people looking at the board, yes — that is all any placement on any site is. As a way to buy traffic or rankings, no. A pixel ad is a spot on a page, not a channel: if nobody visits the board, nobody sees your square.
Do I get a dofollow link from tilesquat?: No. Every outbound link carries rel="sponsored", on the board and on each tile page. We do not sell links that pass ranking signals, at any price. What you buy is a placement people can see and click, not an SEO shortcut.
What happens if someone takes my tile?: They pay 1.5× your tile’s current heat, never less than the floor, and it becomes theirs immediately. There is no refund. You are renting the position with heat, not buying the square.

SQUAT A TILE — $57 of 1,000 taken