Bottongos.com

Committed for Better Business

Alex Tew’s million dollar home page was unique probably for a completely different reason than winning the million dollar. It has spawned an immense number of competitors and there are probably many more on the way. Currently, searching Google returns 1.5 million search results for “pixel ads.”

The problem is that many of them are just clones, with nothing to distinguish them from the growing group, apart from a limited specialization, for example, pixel ads for Christians, countries, cities. It’s a bit easier as you can even download free scripts to do this, eg from http://www.tradebit.com/filedetail.php/722486

So you have to ask yourself a couple of questions.

· Is this viable in the long term? Has the novelty worn off and will anyone actually be interested in seeing pixel ads?

· Are there any innovations that can make pixel ad sites stand out, ie rejuvenate the genre?

My answer is yes, it can be a viable business for some well-managed sites, but since I’ve just built a site, I’m probably a bit biased. Alex Tew had ‘first mover’ advantage, made the money from it and raced. However, there are something like 30 million websites in existence, and I’m guessing a large number of them, maybe 2-5 million are commercial and need a lot of web traffic. Word Tracker reveals 359 searches for “pixel ads” and nearly 200 for “Million Dollar Home Page” in the last 90 days, so there’s still some interest.

Let’s take a look at the current crop and see how they can be improved. Please note that these are my own opinions and I could be (probably) very wrong!

The premise on which a pixel ad website is offered is that you drive traffic to your site if you advertise there. To do that, of course, you need to have a lot of traffic. It’s a chicken and egg situation. There are dozens of sparsely populated websites that will never go anywhere and will eventually die quietly. Its owners have spent a bit of money preparing the site, but that’s the end of it.

Creating a website is easy, but getting attention is not. Here are some principles that I think provide a way forward.

1. Why stick with a monolithic block divided into 10 x 10 pixel blocks? Frankly, it’s both confusing and ugly. I think a future innovation may lie in smaller, less intrusive blocks on the web page, in the same way that Google ads don’t take over a web page, but rather enhance it by offering context sensitive ads.

2. Why limit yourself to a single page? My own site http://logoadz.com has a home page and anyone who pays for an ad there can choose six ‘tags’, each of which has its own page.

3. Why pay per pixel? Be flexible with prices. Why not pay per block? Conceptually they are the same price, but the appearance of the site can be improved by offering larger ad pages of the same size. Ten 100 x 100 pixel ads look much more attractive than the potpourri you normally get.

4. Advertising has to be much more flexible than buying space for 5 years, etc. Why not offer advertising by the week, month or any number of days? Advertisers can then test the site and see if they get the traffic they expect without a huge financial commitment.

This requires the website to be fully automated for advertisers to load their graphics and your ad to be live within an hour if the images can be reconstructed that frequently. There are sites with individual graphics, but the html overload increases the size of the page inordinately. If the ads are changed from day to day, then your website is more interesting to both human visitors and search engines.

5. Provide click statistics so advertisers feel they are getting value for money. Click tracking is not rocket science. Neither is sending a weekly email. Customer service is very important. Help keep them coming back.

6. Try to make your site look different than the Million Dollar home page; experiment with designs. I find it depressing that various websites have cloned the layout, fonts, and colors. There is a huge scope to be innovative here and some sites have done it.

Have I had success with my own site? Well, I’ve applied almost all of these principles, but since the site hasn’t launched yet, it’s too early to tell. It is the first part of a package that I am producing for advertisers. Watch this space!

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