The new project from Million Dollar Homepages Alex Tew is up, its called Pixel Lotto. I’m incredibly jealous of Million Dollar Homepage. I think when I first found it he’d sold 5 blocks and I watched it every few hours/days until he hit the 20k mark when I couldnt look at it anymore, the jealously was just too great.
Pixelotto is a turd. Don’t get me wrong it will be huge and make a lot of money, but its still a turd. It doesnt actually matter though, the amount of press his next venture was going to get it could of actually been nothing more than the sale of a turd on ebay and would still have made $1m. Yeah I know, I’m still jealous and bitter and that has something to do with my savage review of pixelotto but I think there is some substance to it as well. Here goes:
1) Its almost exactly the same idea. In the same way that Guy Ritchie reshot Lock, Stock with Brad Pitt and called it Snatch, Pixelotto is 99% built on the success of MDHP. I really hoped he wouldnt be a one trick pony.
2) Before in MDHP you encouraged the visitor to explore the ads and be curious about which casino clicking one the ads would take you to. Now you are rewarding the visitor for clicking as many as possible. Who wants that kind of traffic? Who wants their site to be spammed with a million clicks by visitors that stay for 0.1sec. Yeah your getting traffic, but its not good traffic.
3) The whole thing is massively open to abuse. How long before someone scams this thing and automates the process? For just $1 it will open an account and click every ad for you. It was simplicity which drove MDHP. The simplicity of the idea, it was perfect, flawless. This isn’t original, these kind of online lotteries have existed for years.
4) Its not even a one-off, if you the read the t&c’s this is just round one. The whole things starts when they hit $1m or in 12mnths. Its not a prime piece of internet space, I mean its well worth the investment maybe for this round but the USP has gone.
What does everyone else think?
Partly due to jealousy, partly due to “why didnt i think of this” and partly due to “i just dont get it”.. i’ve never been a fan of MDHP.
Pixelotto seems completely pointless, trying to put a business model behind what is a unique entity.
And you’re right.. how difficult will it be to write a wee spider to check every pixel on the page? Not very.
It’s bery true that no one sticks on those pages for long, but that doesn’t matter if you have the right model. Pay per view ads on those pages would still bring in an income, until the person paying you realised. It’s all a house of cards, and someone is being ripped off ultimately.
I just signed up, and I feel a little dirty.
And so you should. Content people, content, build it and they will come (probably)!
Lock, Stock was a good film. But Snatch was brilliant. So never offend one of the most brilliant films in history. King Kong was also the second idea after the invention of the gorilla. The zebra the second thing after the invention of stripes.
To the pixel guy: you support his idea by reporting about him. Jealousy drives business. Not that bad.
So, now I go on watching all the Guy Ritchie stuff.
Snatch one of the most brilliant films in history? Its a sham, a sham starring Brad Pitt. I never get tired of lock stock, snatch is memorable only for “ya like dags”.
As for the the king kong strip thing? You’ve lost me a little there, did the gorilla invent king kong? His new idea lacks originality and would not succeed without the success of the first brilliant idea.
I’d agree on the reporting thing but its not like I can crawl under a rock and hope pixelotto will go away, its will such a ton of press that my little blog will do no harm.
do ya like dags?
Seems Alex was site watching, found this site which launched about 2 weeks before him. http://www.myeuropeanunion.eu . On the faq`s page it appears they will be running competitions too.
Thank.you for coming and plugging your site here. I love all these comments from people who are running similar projects shouting “Alex copied me” “he must have been watching” “ive been working on this for severla months”. The point of this post is that this idea is not original, its a minor and worse modification on MDHP. To succeed it needs masses of press which only his will get as it has his name on it.
I beat him too it. I honestly did. And with a better concept too. The odds of winning my competition are much greater! You can check my site out here http://www.cashcells.com - Cheers.
Agreed, its a bit of a lame take on his old model, but it unfortunately seems to be working due to the name he has generated for himself with MDHP. It’s a shame that its not something that will live on, say a particular web application he invested in, but if he can still make money from it then all the best to him.
I didn’t realise it before posting a comment on techcrunch, but the amount of entries to the ‘lottery’ is capped at 10 a day apparently, so having a script automate that process might not be all that beneficial after all.
And lol, copycatters have arrived!
pixel-raffle.com
And the funny thing - they are having success…
Just read an interesting article over at JohnChow.com, is the site actually legal?
That could really screw him over….
http://www.johnchow.com/pixelotto-has-arrived-but-is-it-legal/
Nice article fletchy!
I wonder if you would like to come and let us Pixelotto advertisers know what you think about some of the posts on our forum:
http://www.pixelottosucks.com/forum
Pixelotto is dead, and I am going to bury it.