Million Dollar Homepage & Internet Stunts That Made Real Money

Part 1: The OG Internet Stunts (Pre-2015)

The golden age of internet stunts. Before social media algorithms, before influencer culture, before everyone understood virality — these pioneers stumbled into (or engineered) internet gold.

1. The Million Dollar Homepage — Alex Tew, 2005

URL

milliondollarhomepage.com (still online)

The concept

A 1000×1000 pixel grid. Each pixel sold for $1. Minimum purchase: 100 pixels (10×10 block) for $100. Buyers got a tiny image linking to their website. Created by 21-year-old British student Alex Tew to fund his university education.

The numbers

• Setup cost: €50 for domain registration and hosting
• First sale: 3 days after launch (August 26, 2005) — a friend bought 400 pixels
• Two weeks in: 4,700 pixels sold (friends and family)
• September 15, 2005: 15,100 pixels sold
• End of September 2005: $250,000 in revenue
• October 6, 2005: 65,000 unique visitors/day
• October 26, 2005: 500,900+ pixels sold to 1,400 customers
• December 31, 2005: 999,000 pixels purchased
• January 2006: Last 1,000 pixels auctioned on eBay — MillionDollarWeightLoss.com won at $38,000
• Grand total: $1,037,100 in ~5 months

Current state (2026)

The site is still online but decaying. Only 40.5% of links still work. 17.5% return browser errors. In 2014, 22% of pixels led to dead links — the rot has accelerated. It is now a digital fossil: a time capsule of the mid-2000s internet, increasingly disconnected from the living web. Harvard Law’s Library Innovation Lab studied it as a case study in digital decay.

Why it worked

The audacity of the concept was the marketing. “Student sells pixels for a dollar each” is an irresistible news story. Early buyers got legitimate traffic. Later buyers paid for bragging rights. The business model was self-reinforcing: media coverage drove visitors, visitors drove sales, sales drove more media coverage. The $1/pixel price was genius — low enough that anyone could buy, high enough that one million pixels equals exactly one million dollars.

2. Alex Tew: From Pixels to a $2B Meditation App

The full timeline

• 2005: Million Dollar Homepage — $1M in 5 months. Net after taxes: ~$700K. Dropped out of university and moved to London.
• 2006–2010: A string of failures. Pixelotto (sell pixels at $2 each with a lottery for visitors) raised ~$153K–$200K before being abandoned — it aimed for $2M. OneMillionPeople — failed. PopJam (2008–2011) — failed. None came close to replicating the hit.
• January 2011: DoNothingFor2Minutes.com — a single page with a sunset, wave sounds, and a 2-minute countdown. 2 million visits in 10 days. This was the precursor to Calm.
• 2012: Co-founded Calm with Michael Acton Smith. Cobbled together $1.5M in initial funding.
• 2013: Calm’s first year: ~$100K revenue.
• 2015: Revenue hit $2M after hiring meditation teacher Tamara Levitt.
• 2020: Calm valued at $2 billion.
• 2024: Calm revenue reached $596.4 million.

Key insight

Tew’s story is the most important case study in internet stunt economics. The stunt itself ($1M) was trivial compared to what the stunt taught him. He spent 5 years failing to repeat the novelty trick. Then he pivoted to building a real product informed by what he’d learned about virality, simplicity, and human attention. DoNothingFor2Minutes.com — itself a mini-stunt — was the bridge between “pixel salesman” and “$2B company founder.” The arc from MillionDollarHomepage to Calm is: stunt → failed copies → insight → real business.

3. Pixelotto & The Copycat Graveyard

Pixelotto (Alex Tew, 2006)

Same concept as the Million Dollar Homepage but with pixels at $2 each and a lottery incentive for visitors. Target: $2M. Actual result: ~$153K–$200K. Refunded early buyers. Closed in 2015. Even the creator of the original couldn’t repeat it.

The copycat phenomenon

Hundreds of pixel-selling sites launched in 2005–2006. Alex Tew himself said: “copycats are all competing with each other” and “have very little ads, therefore I guess it’s not going too well for them.” Examples:

• Million Euro Homepage — largely failed
• Million Dollar Wiki — largely failed
• Million Pixel Page — largely failed
• pixels4all.com — generated an estimated $9.60 in total revenue from 4,800 pixels sold

The lesson

Internet stunts are winner-take-all. The first mover doesn’t just get an advantage — they get everything. The novelty is the product, and novelty is non-repeatable by definition. Even the inventor’s own sequel failed. This is the single most important economic fact about internet stunts.

4. SaveKaryn.com — Karyn Bosnak, 2002

URL

savekaryn.com (defunct)

The concept

New York woman with $20,000 in shopping-induced credit card debt launches a website asking strangers to send her money. The tagline: “Save Karyn.”

The numbers

• $13,000 raised in ~20 weeks from random strangers
• Paid off the remaining debt by selling possessions on eBay and saving from her job
• Landed a book deal: Save Karyn published in 2003, became a bestseller with Today Show and 20/20 appearances
• Sony subsidiary bought movie rights in 2003
• Second book, 20 Times a Number, became the 2011 film “What’s Your Number?” starring Anna Faris and Chris Evans

Key insight

One of the earliest examples of “cyber begging” — the direct ancestor of GoFundMe, Buy Me a Coffee, and every tip jar on the internet. The $13K from the site was trivial. The book deals and movie rights were the real payoff. The stunt was the resume; the career was the revenue.

5. One Red Paperclip — Kyle MacDonald, 2005–2006

URL

oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com

The concept

Trade one red paperclip, through a chain of increasingly valuable trades, up to a house. All trades documented publicly on a blog and Craigslist.

The trade chain (14 trades, exactly one year)

1. July 14, 2005: Red paperclip → fish-shaped pen
2. Fish pen → hand-sculpted doorknob (Seattle)
3. July 25: Doorknob → Coleman camp stove (Amherst, MA)
4. Sept 24: Camp stove → Honda generator (California)
5. Nov 16: Generator → “instant party” (empty keg + neon Budweiser sign, Queens, NY)
6. Dec 8: Instant party → Ski-Doo snowmobile (Quebec)
7. Snowmobile → two-person trip to Yahk, BC
8. ~Jan 7, 2006: Trip → box truck
9. ~Feb 22: Box truck → recording contract (Metalworks, Mississauga)
10. ~Apr 11: Recording contract → year’s rent in Phoenix
11. ~Apr 26: Year’s rent → one afternoon with Alice Cooper
12. ~May 26: Afternoon with Cooper → KISS snow globe
13. ~Jun 2: Snow globe → role in film Donna on Demand (from Corbin Bernsen)
14. July 12, 2006: Movie role → a two-story farmhouse at 503 Main Street, Kipling, Saskatchewan

The outcome

From a paperclip to a house in exactly one year, 14 trades. MacDonald wrote a book about it. The town of Kipling, Saskatchewan turned the story into a tourism attraction. The house still stands.

Key insight

Not a direct revenue play, but a masterclass in narrative momentum. Each trade was a story. Each story got media coverage. The media coverage made the next trade possible. The trades got bigger because the attention got bigger — attention was the currency being traded, not the objects.

6. 27b/6 (David Thorne) — Email Pranks to NYT Bestseller

URL

27bslash6.com

The concept

Australian humourist David Thorne published collections of absurd email exchanges on his website — the most famous being his attempt to pay an overdue bill with a drawing of a seven-legged spider (2008).

The numbers

• The spider drawing email exchange went viral in late 2008 via email forwarding and social media, crashing his servers
• Self-published The Internet is a Playground — a real publisher picked it up
• Hit the New York Times bestseller list
• 80,000 copies sold in the first month
• As of 2019: over 1 million copies sold, translated into Japanese, German, French, and Spanish

Key insight

Thorne never monetized the website directly. The emails were the content, the virality was the distribution, and the book deal was the monetization. Same pattern as SaveKaryn: free viral content → traditional media deal. At ~$2–4 royalty per book and 1M+ copies, this is a multi-million-dollar outcome from email pranks.

7. Ship Your Enemies Glitter — Mathew Carpenter, 2015

URL

shipyourenemiesglitter.com (still operating)

The concept

Pay $9.99 to anonymously mail someone an envelope full of glitter. The tagline: “We’ll send them so much glitter they’ll be finding it for weeks.”

The numbers

• Registered: December 31, 2014
• Viral moment: January 2015 — over 1 million visitors in a single day
• Carpenter posted on the site begging people to stop buying (itself a PR stunt)
• Sold on Flippa for $85,000 on January 22, 2015 to Peter Boychuk
• Total time from registration to sale: ~3 weeks
• Under Boychuk: built warehouse, hired 3–5 employees, grew to high six figures in annual sales

The meta-stunt

Carpenter later revealed the website was inspired by Ryan Holiday’s book Trust Me, I’m Lying — it was a deliberately engineered viral marketing stunt. He played the “overwhelmed small business owner” character perfectly, from feigning shock to the “please stop buying” appeal. The entire thing was a media manipulation playbook executed in real time.

8. I Am Rich — Armin Heinrich, 2008

The concept

An iPhone app priced at $999.99 — the maximum Apple allowed — that did absolutely nothing except display a glowing red gem. Its only purpose: to show others you could afford to waste $1,000.

The numbers

• Released: August 5, 2008
• Removed by Apple: less than 24 hours later
• 8 copies sold (6 US, 1 Germany, 1 France)
• Developer net revenue: ~$5,600
• Apple’s cut: ~$2,400

Key insight

Pure Veblen good. The price was the product. The $5,600 revenue is irrelevant; the concept proved that digital status signaling has no ceiling. This was the spiritual ancestor of NFTs, premium “nothing” products, and every $999 digital good. The concept has been reborn thousands of times since — each time making more money than the original.

9. Potato Salad Kickstarter — Zack Brown, 2014

URL

Kickstarter project page

The concept

Zack “Danger” Brown from Columbus, Ohio asked Kickstarter for $10 to make potato salad. His pitch was one sentence. He hadn’t decided what kind yet.

The numbers

• Goal: $10
• Raised: $55,492 from 6,911 backers
• Surpassed $50,000 in less than a week
• After fulfilling rewards, remaining funds donated to the Columbus Foundation
• Threw “PotatoStock 2014” — a public party in downtown Columbus with bands, food trucks, and potato salad

The copycat test

Dozens of copycat “fund my mundane thing” Kickstarters launched immediately. One raised $10 total. This is the clearest possible demonstration of the novelty-is-non-repeatable rule.

10. BuyMyFace.com — Ross Harper & Ed Moyse, 2011–2012

URL

buymyface.com

The concept

Two British students with ~$80,000 in combined student debt sold ad space on their faces. They painted company logos on their faces daily and photographed the results for the website.

The numbers

• Starting price: $1.50/day
• Peak price: $600/day
• Advertisers included Ernst & Young
• By April 2012: 69% of their $80K debt covered by ad revenue
• Completed the year-long project with enough to cover their full student debt

Key insight

A more literal version of “selling your face for money” than any influencer deal. The escalating price dynamic mirrors the Million Dollar Homepage: early buyers get cheap, later buyers pay for the attention the earlier coverage generated.

11. Half.com & the Town of Halfway, Oregon — 1999–2000

The concept

Startup Half.com (a marketplace selling items at 50%+ off retail) paid the town of Halfway, Oregon to rename itself “Half.com, Oregon” for one year.

The numbers

• Cost of stunt: $100,000 cash + 20 computers for Halfway Elementary School + prize for Baker County Fair + seed money for community development
• Date: December 1999
• Result: Massive national media coverage — every outlet covered the “town renamed after a website” story
• June 2000: eBay acquired Half.com for $312.8 million
• ROI: ~$100K in → $312.8M acquisition 6 months later

Key insight

Possibly the highest-ROI PR stunt in American business history. The $100K spend generated enough awareness that eBay paid $312.8 million for the company just six months later. The cost-per-dollar-of-acquisition-value was approximately $0.00032. The town reverted to “Halfway” after the agreement expired.

12. “A Life for Sale” — Ian Usher, 2008

The concept

After a devastating divorce, British-Australian Ian Usher listed his “entire life” on eBay: his house (with everything in it), his car, his motorbike, his job introduction, and his friends’ contact details.

The numbers

• Bidding went viral — bids briefly reached $2.2 million (from a 15-year-old without the money)
• Final sale price: AU$399,300 (~USD $309,000 at the time)
• Used the money to travel the world pursuing 100 lifetime goals in 100 weeks
• Wrote a book: A Life Sold
• 2011: Bought a Caribbean island in Bocas del Toro, Panama for $27,500
• Sold the island in 2015 — another “life for sale”

Key insight

The “selling my life” narrative is infinitely compelling to media. The auction itself was the content. The book was the monetization. The career as a speaker/writer about “starting over” was the long tail.

Part 2: Creative Monetization Stunts (2010–2020)

The internet matured. Social media created distribution channels. Payment rails (Stripe, PayPal) made it easy to collect money from strangers. Stunts became more sophisticated, more deliberate, and more profitable.

1. Cards Against Humanity — The Greatest Stunt Machine in Business History

The company

“A party game for horrible people.” Launched via a $15,570 Kickstarter in 2011. Estimated $40–$50 million/year in sales. Product valued at ~$500 million as of 2023.

The Black Friday stunts (with real revenue)

Year	Stunt	Revenue	Details
2013	Anti-Sale	Increased	Raised the price of the game by $5 on Black Friday. Sales went up.
2014	Bullshit Box	$180,000	Sold 30,000 boxes of literal bull excrement at $6 each. Sold out in under 1 hour. Net profit: $6,000 (20 cents/box). Donated all profit to Heifer International.
2015	Nothing for $5	$71,145	Sold absolutely nothing. 11,248 people paid $5 to receive nothing.
2016	Holiday Hole	$100,573	Raised money to dig a pointless hole in rural Illinois. Livestreamed the digging. As long as money kept coming, they kept digging.
2017	Saves America	~$2,250,000	150,000 people paid $15 each for “six days of incredible surprises.” Used funds to buy land on the US/Mexico border and retain an eminent domain lawyer to obstruct the border wall. Also bought naming rights to a minor league baseball stadium and funded 14 months of public opinion polls. Raised $2M+ in 9 hours.

Why it works (repeatedly)

Cards Against Humanity is the rare exception to the “can’t repeat a stunt” rule — because the stunts are the brand, not a marketing hack. Each stunt reinforces the identity (“we’re the company that will do anything”). The stunts generate millions in free media coverage that drives sales of the actual game. The brand is the stunt; the stunt is the brand. Every year, the internet asks “what will CAH do this Black Friday?” — which is itself free marketing.

2. The “I Quit” Viral Video — Marina Shifrin, 2013

The concept

25-year-old Marina Shifrin filmed herself dancing at 4:30 AM in her Taiwan office to Kanye West’s “Gone” to announce she was quitting her job at a video production company that prioritized quantity over quality.

The numbers

• 11.8 million views in 5 days
• Job offer from The Queen Latifah Show (on-air, during an appearance)
• Job offer from Y&R Israel (via a response video)
• Accepted a job on @midnight with Chris Hardwick

The aftermath

Shifrin later wrote candidly about the reality: after the viral moment, she worked nearly 50 different jobs ranging from dog sitter to TV writer. The viral fame opened doors but didn’t create a sustainable career path by itself. This is the cautionary tale of virality without a product to sell.

3. Bored Ape Yacht Club — The $4B Internet Stunt, 2021

The concept

10,000 cartoon ape profile pictures sold as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. Mint price: 0.08 ETH (~$190).

The numbers

• April 2021: Collection sold out in less than 12 hours at 0.08 ETH each
• Initial mint revenue: ~$1.9 million (10,000 × ~$190)
• All-time NFT sales volume: $3.18 billion (2nd highest of all time)
• Sotheby’s auction: Bundle of 101 apes sold for $24.4 million
• 2022: Yuga Labs (parent company) valued at $4 billion
• December 2024: Market cap ~$809 million — down ~80% from peak
• 9,998 NFTs held by 5,637 unique owners

Key insight

BAYC is the Million Dollar Homepage of the crypto era. Same mechanics: sell a piece of a fixed-size digital space, create scarcity, let social dynamics drive the price up. The differences: blockchain made the ownership verifiable and tradeable, and the crash was far more dramatic. The original Million Dollar Homepage buyers lost their money when the linked websites died. BAYC holders lost their money when the floor price collapsed from ~$400K to ~$80K per ape.

4. “Comedian” (Banana Taped to Wall) — Maurizio Cattelan, 2019–2024

The concept

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a fresh banana to a gallery wall and titled it “Comedian.” Edition of three.

The numbers

• 2019: First two editions sold at Art Basel Miami for $120,000–$150,000 each
• November 20, 2024: Edition #2 sold at Sotheby’s for $6,240,000 ($5.2M hammer price + fees)
• Buyer: Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, who then ate the banana on camera
• What the buyer receives: A certificate of authenticity granting permission to reproduce the banana-and-tape arrangement. Not the banana itself. The banana and tape are replaced as needed.

Key insight

This is the fine art world’s version of the Million Dollar Homepage. The concept IS the product. The media attention IS the value. The controversy IS the marketing. Sun buying it for $6.2M and eating it generated more media coverage than the GDP of some small nations — which increased the value of the concept for the next owner. Attention compounds.

5. r/place — Reddit’s Collaborative Pixel Wars, 2017–2023

The concept

Reddit users collectively edit a shared canvas, one pixel at a time, with a cooldown timer between placements. The result: massive collaborative (and competitive) pixel art.

The numbers

• 2017: ~1 million users placed ~16 million pixels on a 1000×1000 canvas
• 2022: Canvas expanded to 2000×2000 (4 million pixels), 32 colors. Caused Reddit’s daily active users to reach an all-time peak.
• 2023: Relaunched under the tagline “Right Place, Wrong Time” amid the Reddit API controversy. Over 10.4 million users participated.

Key insight

r/place is the Million Dollar Homepage inverted: instead of buying pixels, you earn them through participation. Reddit doesn’t charge for pixels, but the event drives enormous engagement that increases Reddit’s advertising value and user metrics. The “revenue” is in platform engagement, not direct sales. It’s also the purest demonstration that people will fight fiercely over worthless digital real estate if you give them a shared canvas.

6. Zombo.com — The Useless Web’s Patron Saint, 1999

URL

zombo.com (still online as of February 2026)

The concept

A single page that plays a looping voice saying “Welcome to Zombo.com. You can do anything at Zombo.com. The only limit is yourself.” Created by Josh Levine as a parody of overwrought Flash intro pages of the late 1990s.

The economics

Revenue: $0. The site serves no ads, collects no data, and actively loses money on hosting and domain fees. It is the anti-business, the zero-revenue internet artifact that has somehow persisted for 27 years. As of October 2025, it ranks 201st globally among humor websites.

Key insight

Zombo.com matters because it represents the other possible outcome: pure internet art with zero monetization. It’s the control group. Every other entry on this page is a Zombo.com that figured out how to charge money.

7. The Useless Web — Tim Holman, 2012

URL

theuselessweb.com

The concept

A single button that sends you to a random “useless” website. Built by Tim Holman during a hurricane lockdown.

The numbers

• 2.7 million unique pageviews in the first 3 weeks
• Average bounce rate: 23% (extremely low — people kept clicking)
• Hit #3 on Hacker News, topped multiple subreddits
• Monetization: display ads (bottom of page)

Key insight

The simplest possible product — one button, one function — generated millions of visits. The “useless” label is its own marketing: it sets expectations to zero, so any entertainment feels like a bonus. The 23% bounce rate means 77% of visitors clicked the button at least twice.

8. I Will Teach You To Be Rich — Ramit Sethi, 2004–present

URL

iwillteachyoutoberich.com

The concept

Stanford student starts a blog with the audacious name “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” in 2004. The name itself was a stunt — deliberately provocative, deliberately un-humble.

The numbers

• 2004: Started as a blog while at Stanford, applied to 65 scholarships to fund his own education
• 2009: Published the book I Will Teach You To Be Rich — NYT Bestseller
• Grew to 1 million readers/month
• Documented milestone: $5 million in revenue in 6 days (from a course launch)
• Built a media empire: podcasts, courses, coaching, Netflix show

Key insight

The name “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” was the stunt. It made people angry, curious, or dismissive — all of which drove clicks. The name is so audacious it’s memorable. Sethi understood that the title was the marketing, the content was the product, and the reaction was the distribution. The provocation is the funnel.

Part 3: Modern Equivalents (2020–2026)

The stunt has evolved. Modern internet stunts aren’t one-off pixel grids — they’re entire business philosophies built on shipping fast, building in public, and treating novelty as a renewable resource through volume.

1. Pieter Levels — The $3M/Year Solo Stunt Machine

The philosophy

In March 2014, Levels publicly committed to launching 12 startups in 12 months. Not prototypes — fully functional websites with live payment systems. The goal: ship fast, learn what works, kill what doesn’t. Most projects failed. A few got traction.

The portfolio (with revenue, as of late 2025)

Product	Monthly Revenue	Notes
PhotoAI.com	$100,000+	AI headshot generator. 70% of total income. Hit $100K/mo by Sept 2024, ~18 months after launch.
RemoteOK.com	$41,000	Remote job board. Previously peaked at $140K/mo, crashed to $10K/mo, recovered.
InteriorAI.com	$40,000	AI interior design tool.
NomadList.com	~$125,000	City database for digital nomads. $1.5M+ ARR.

Total: ~$3 million/year. Zero employees. Built with PHP and jQuery.

Key insight

Levels solved the “stunts can’t be repeated” problem through volume. Instead of trying to make one thing go viral, he ships dozens of things and lets the market decide. His competitive advantage: he ships before things are ready. “The first version of Photo AI had terrible output quality. So bad. But people paid anyway.” He improved based on real usage, not hypothetical requirements. Speed is the moat.

2. Marc Lou — ShipFast & the Info-Product Stunt

The concept

After 27 failed projects, Marc Lou launched ShipFast — a NextJS boilerplate that helps developers ship startups quickly. Then expanded into a portfolio of products and info-products.

The numbers

• ShipFast launch (Sept 2023): $40,000 first month
• ShipFast run rate (April 2024): $133,000/month
• Total monthly income (March 2024): $83,212 from 10 products
• CodeFast launch (Nov 2024): $92,000 in 48 hours
• January 2025: $124,772/month across 11+ products
• 2024 projected annual income: ~$1.5 million
• Product Hunt Maker of the Year 2024

Key insight

Marc Lou is the modern synthesis of the stunt + the product. Every launch is a micro-stunt (built in public, tweeted about, Product Hunt launched). Every product is designed for fast shipping. The stunt is the build-in-public narrative. Revenue numbers posted publicly create their own virality — “indie hacker makes $124K/month” is a news story that drives traffic to the products.

3. Buy Me a Coffee — The Monetized Internet Stunt Platform

URL

buymeacoffee.com

The concept

Two brothers built a platform that lets creators receive tips (from $3–$5) and memberships. Essentially, a modern version of SaveKaryn.com — scaled into infrastructure.

The numbers

• Bootstrapped from $1,600
• ARR: ~$4.9 million
• Creators on platform: over 1 million
• Total distributed to creators: ~$150 million
• Platform fee: 5%

Key insight

Buy Me a Coffee is what happens when you productize the “please give me money on the internet” impulse that SaveKaryn pioneered. Karyn Bosnak raised $13K. Buy Me a Coffee has distributed $150M. The evolution: individual stunt → platform enabling millions of micro-stunts.

4. The “Boring Businesses” Movement — Codie Sanchez, 2022–present

The concept

Codie Sanchez built a massive following by promoting the counterintuitive idea that the best businesses are “boring” — laundromats, vending machines, car washes, pressure washing companies. The anti-startup startup movement.

The numbers

• Gained 1.5 million followers in 24 months across platforms
• Built a $30 million portfolio of 25 boring businesses producing 8 figures in revenue
• Co-founded Unconventional Acquisitions (teaching others to buy small businesses)
• Founded Contrarian Thinking (newsletter)
• Typical boring business economics: laundromat = $20K–$40K/month revenue; vending machine route (100+ machines) = $100K/month

Key insight

The stunt here is the narrative, not the businesses. “Boring businesses make you rich” is itself a viral, counterintuitive story. Sanchez monetizes the attention through courses, newsletters, and deal flow — the meta-business of talking about boring businesses is not boring at all. The content about the business is more profitable than the business itself.

5. Domain Flipping — The Oldest Internet Stunt Still Working

2024–2025 market data

• Total domain market sales in 2024: $185 million (up 32.8% from 2023)
• AI.com: $70 million (biggest publicly reported domain sale ever)
• Chat.com: $15.5 million (acquired by OpenAI)
• Rocket.com: $14 million (2024)
• Icon.com: $12 million (April 2025)
• Bagel.com: $500,000
• Humanity.org: $225,000
• Average .ai domain resale price in 2024: $6,525

Key insight

Domain speculation is the original internet stunt business — buying something for $10 that might be worth $10M someday. The AI boom has created an entirely new wave: .ai domains are the new .com. This is one of the very few internet stunt categories where copycats can succeed, because each domain is inherently unique.

6. NFT Million Dollar Homepage Clones — 2016–2022

The concept

Multiple projects attempted to recreate the Million Dollar Homepage on the blockchain, selling pixel ownership as NFTs.

Notable examples

• PixelMap (2016): Deployed to Ethereum in November 2016 by Ken Erwin. Nearly vanished from the internet between 2018 and August 2021, then was rediscovered by an “NFT Archaeologist” and revived during the NFT boom.
• Million Dollar Token Page (MDTP): 10,000 blocks on a 1000×1000 grid, each as an NFT on Ethereum.
• NFT Pixel Project: Community-designed NFT where each pixel is contributed by a different person.

Key insight

None of these replicated the original’s success. Adding blockchain to a proven concept doesn’t create novelty — it creates a derivative. PixelMap’s most interesting moment was being forgotten and rediscovered, which briefly created the novelty that the original concept lacked. The NFT boom was itself a stunt economy, and it followed the same copycat economics as the pixel page copycats: the first movers captured almost all the value.

Part 4: The Economics & Playbook

What separates a viral moment from a viral business? What makes internet stunts monetizable versus just entertaining? Here is the data-driven framework.

1. Monetizable vs. Just Viral: The Revenue Equation

Not every viral moment makes money. The difference comes down to five factors:

The rule: A stunt is monetizable when the act of participating in the stunt requires spending money, OR when the stunt creates an asset (audience, IP, brand) that can be monetized later.

2. The PR Hack Economics: Earned Media Value

The formula

Earned media value = what you would have paid to buy the same attention through advertising.

Case studies

• Half.com → Town rename: $100K investment generated enough media coverage to facilitate a $312.8M acquisition. Earned media value: conservatively $10M+ in press coverage. ROI: ~3,000x.
• Cards Against Humanity Black Friday stunts: Each stunt (cost: $70K–$2.25M) generates global media coverage worth an estimated $5M–$20M in equivalent ad spend. These drive holiday season sales of the actual game ($40–$50M/year).
• Dollar Shave Club launch video: $4,500 video generated 12,000 orders in 48 hours. Customer acquisition cost: $0.375/customer. The video ultimately contributed to a $1B acquisition.
• Banana Taped to Wall: $0 in production cost (banana + tape). $6.24M in direct revenue. Billions of media impressions. The earned media value dwarfs the sale price.

3. Copycat Economics: Why Second Place Gets Nothing

The data is unambiguous:

Even when the original creator tries to copy themselves (Pixelotto), the result is 80–95% less revenue. When outsiders copy, the result is often 99.99% less. Novelty has a one-time-use property. It cannot be borrowed, rented, or replicated.

4. The Shelf Life of Internet Stunts

Attention half-life

• Viral spike: 1–7 days of peak attention
• Secondary coverage: 2–4 weeks of long-tail articles, podcasts, and analysis
• Annual nostalgia: “Remember when...” articles (Million Dollar Homepage gets these every 5 years)
• Terminal decay: Most stunt websites are dead within 2–5 years. Million Dollar Homepage is an exception precisely because it’s frozen in time.

Monetization window

The research across all examples suggests a 48–72 hour window for maximum monetization of viral attention. Ship Your Enemies Glitter was sold within 3 weeks of launch — that was the optimal exit. Ian Usher’s auction ran while attention was hot. Cards Against Humanity times every stunt for Black Friday, the single best day for impulse purchases. If you don’t monetize during the spike, the value decays exponentially.

5. Can You Do It Twice? The Repeat Stunt Economics

Almost never — with one exception pattern

• Alex Tew: Pixelotto after Million Dollar Homepage → 80%+ revenue decline. Failed.
• Zack Brown: No second Kickstarter. One and done.
• Mathew Carpenter: Sold Ship Your Enemies Glitter and moved on. Smart exit.
• Cards Against Humanity: Succeeds repeatedly — because the brand IS the stunt identity. They’re not repeating a specific stunt; they’re fulfilling a brand promise (“we will do something outrageous”). Each stunt is new; the pattern is the repeat.
• Pieter Levels: Succeeds repeatedly — by redefining “stunt” as “ship a new product in public.” Each launch is a micro-stunt. Volume replaces novelty.

The pattern

You can’t repeat the same stunt. You can repeat the pattern of doing stunts if doing stunts IS your identity. Cards Against Humanity and Pieter Levels are not repeating stunts — they’re running stunt factories.

6. The Distribution Stack: How Stunts Spread

Platform-era distribution (2005 vs. 2026)

Era	Primary Distribution	Time to Viral	Example
2002–2005	Email forwarding, Slashdot, Digg, blogs	Days to weeks	SaveKaryn, Million Dollar Homepage
2008–2014	Reddit, Twitter, early Facebook, YouTube	Hours to days	I Am Rich, Potato Salad, David Thorne
2015–2020	Reddit + Twitter + Product Hunt + HN	Hours	Ship Your Enemies Glitter, BAYC
2021–2026	TikTok + Twitter/X + newsletters + Discord	Minutes to hours	Pieter Levels, Marc Lou, Codie Sanchez

Modern launch stack

1. Product Hunt — top-3 spot drives 20K–60K visits in 24 hours
2. Hacker News — Show HN can drive 10K–50K visits
3. Twitter/X — build-in-public threads with revenue numbers (posts featuring specific MRR numbers consistently generate 30–50+ comments on Indie Hackers)
4. Reddit — r/SaaS, r/startups, r/EntrepreneurRideAlong
5. TikTok — accounted for 51% of commerce ad traffic on Black Friday 2025 (up from 16% in 2024)

7. Modern Tools That Make Stunts Easier

Payment

• Stripe: 2.9% + $0.30/transaction. Accept payments in minutes, not weeks.
• Lemon Squeezy: 5% + $0.50/transaction. Handles global tax compliance as merchant of record. Acquired by Stripe in July 2024.
• Gumroad: 10% flat fee. Zero-friction digital product sales.
• Buy Me a Coffee: 5% fee. Tips and memberships for creators.

Infrastructure

• Vercel/Netlify: Deploy a website in seconds, free tier handles viral traffic
• Cloudflare: Free CDN absorbs traffic spikes
• Cursor/Claude Code: Build the entire site with AI in hours, not weeks

The economics shift

In 2005, Alex Tew needed €50 and basic web hosting knowledge. In 2026, you need $0 (free tiers) and a conversation with an AI coding assistant. The barrier to entry for internet stunts has dropped from “can you build a website?” to “can you describe a website?”

Part 5: Opportunities NOW (2026)

Given everything above — the patterns, the economics, the history, the tools — what could work today?

1. The Scale of the Opportunity

Creator economy size

• 2024: $205–$250 billion
• 2027 projection: $500 billion
• 2034 projection: $1.345 trillion (23.3% CAGR)
• Payments to creators increased 79% year-over-year in 2025
• 95% of creators are leaning into direct-to-fan models (away from ad dependence)
• Creators who own their audience (email lists) are 2.7x more likely to earn $31K+

AI market

Global AI market projected to hit $2.5 trillion by 2026. The overlap between AI and attention stunts is the fertile ground.

2. Patterns That Could Work in 2026

Pattern A: AI + Novelty Product

Pieter Levels proved this with PhotoAI ($100K/month). The playbook: take an AI capability that exists, wrap it in the simplest possible UX, give it a memorable name, charge money immediately, ship in public. The “stunt” is the audacity of shipping fast with terrible v1 quality. What AI capability in 2026 is underexploited as a consumer product? AI voice cloning, AI music generation, AI video personalization, AI document analysis — all have consumer wrappers that nobody has nailed yet.

Pattern B: The Anti-Product

Cards Against Humanity sells nothing for $5. “I Am Rich” sold a red gem for $999. Supreme sold a brick for $30. The playbook: sell the absence of value, or sell pure status. In 2026, the equivalent might be: an AI that does nothing (but costs $99/month), a membership to an exclusive club that doesn’t exist, or a digital certificate of something meaningless but expensive.

Pattern C: The Build-in-Public Stunt Factory

Marc Lou’s model: ship fast, post revenue numbers publicly, let the meta-narrative (“indie hacker makes $X”) drive traffic. Every launch is a micro-stunt. The portfolio of products creates resilience. The content about building is itself a product (CodeFast: $92K in 48 hours).

Pattern D: Physical + Digital Hybrid

The Cattelan banana proves that physical stunts with digital distribution are more powerful than ever. A banana taped to a wall becomes a $6.2M asset because the internet amplifies the story. Modern equivalents: physical products designed to be photographed and shared, experiences designed to be filmed, objects designed to be controversial.

Pattern E: The Boring Business Content Play

Codie Sanchez built a $30M portfolio by talking about buying boring businesses. The meta-business (content about business) is more scalable than the businesses themselves. In 2026, the pattern extends to: content about buying AI tools, content about automating small businesses, content about any counterintuitive business strategy.

Pattern F: Platform Stunt Arbitrage

Product Hunt top-3 = 20K–60K visits. Indie Hackers journey posts convert at 23.1%. Reddit launch posts can outperform Product Hunt itself (Farid Shukurov got 1,450 visitors from a Reddit post about his Product Hunt strategy — more than his #1 PH launch). The platform itself is the stunt venue. The audience for “how I launched” content is larger than the audience for the product itself.

3. What Will NOT Work in 2026

Pixel pages

Done. Even the blockchain version is done. Do not sell pixels.

NFT anything

The NFT stunt window closed in 2022. BAYC market cap is down 80%. The technology may find uses; the stunt is over.

Crowdfunding jokes

The Potato Salad window is closed. Kickstarter and GoFundMe are saturated with ironic campaigns. The novelty has been fully extracted.

“Please give me money for nothing”

SaveKaryn worked in 2002. By 2026, GoFundMe fatigue is real. You need to give something — even if that something is entertainment or status.

Direct copies of any stunt on this page

If it’s on this page, it’s done. The copycat data is unambiguous: $1M for the original, $9.60 for the copy.

4. The Synthesis: What an Internet Stunt Business Looks Like in 2026

The most important insight from this entire analysis is Alex Tew’s arc:

Stunt ($1M, 2005) → Failed copies ($200K, 2006–2010) → Mini-stunt proving insight (DoNothingFor2Minutes, 2M visits, 2011) → Real business informed by stunt knowledge (Calm, $596M revenue, 2024).

The stunt is not the business. The stunt is the education. It teaches you:

• What captures attention (simplicity, audacity, constraint)
• How fast attention decays (48–72 hours)
• That novelty cannot be repeated (Pixelotto’s failure)
• That attention must be converted immediately (Ship Your Enemies Glitter’s 3-week exit)
• That the long game requires a real product (Calm’s $596M vs. MillionDollarHomepage’s $1M)

The modern playbook is therefore:

1. Ship a stunt. Something novel, audacious, simple, with a built-in transaction. Use free tools (Vercel, Cloudflare, Stripe). Total cost: $0–$50.
2. Monetize during the spike. You have 48–72 hours of peak attention. Charge money from minute one. Don’t wait for polish.
3. Exit or pivot within 30 days. If the stunt worked, either sell the asset (like Carpenter) or pivot to a real product informed by what you learned (like Tew).
4. If going long, build a stunt factory. Don’t try to repeat one stunt. Ship many things. Let the portfolio absorb the failure rate. (Levels, Lou)
5. The real money is in the second act. Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage made $1M. Calm makes $596M/year. The stunt is the prologue.