A search on Google for pixel sites gives 22,7000 results.
The rage started when a 21 year old from England launched an
advertising site where you paid $1 per pixel of advertising and the
page was divided into 1,000,000 pixels. The advertising sold out
and the guy made a cool million dollars! And get this the last
remaining 1000 pixels were sold on ebay for a staggering $38,100!

The original site - The Million Dollar Homepage was launched on
26th August 2005. The guy then emailed all his friends and told them
to pass on details of his site to their friends and so on...and then
he sold his first 400 pixels for $400. At this stage the site was
getting around 100 hits a day so he started to contact the press. An
IT news site picked it up and ran an article resulting in 2000 hits
an hour, it got ranked by Google and the hits went up to 35,000 a
day.

And as the ball started rolling the visitors to the site increased,
more pixels were sold, the guy made more money and the press interest
increased. The site was getting over 100,000 unique visitors in 2 days
and the UK nationals ran stories on the site. Then the story found its
way into US papers, TV appearances followed and so on....publicity
generates publicity. The site was getting hundreds of thousands of
unique visitors and advertisers were seeing a good click through rate
for their adverts.

Further TV interviews and radio interviews followed, Reuters ran an
article on the site, as did the Wall Street Journal. With the last few
remaining pixels auctioned on eBay the guy made is million dollars on
11th January 2006 - less of course any costs he incurred.

And then of course, the site was hacked and money demanded (which the
FBI are currently investigating) but even this led to more media interest.

By the end of October 2005 hundreds of copy cat sites had started
to spring up. Now there are thousands of them if not more. Have you
visited any of these - most have no adverts on them, no traffic and
no one in their right mind would choose to advertise on them.

So why have thousands of others thought they could hop on the bandwagon
and make a quick $1,000,000? This guy had an unprecedented level of
media attention, driving thousands and thousands of visitors to the
site.

Even the guy behind the Million Dollar Home Page pixel site acknowledges
that it is not a lasting business idea but a novel one off idea. There
is no long term business concept and it will only work once. How long
it will take those jumping on the pixel bandwagon to realise this -
who knows!