1/100000th of the Tew fortuneLackadaisical investors be gutted! Near the beginning of 2006 your opportunity to own some pixels on the Million Dollar Homepage went away…because Alex Tew, aged a disgustingly young 21 or so, sold the final few pixels on said page, hence raising slightly more than an student-fantasy million dollars. Fear not though, other opportunities for squandering your money away on pretty much nothing continue to exist.

Mr Tew's premise was to have a page consisting of a million individual pixels, and charge advertisers (or, more accurately at first, family and friends) $1 per pixel until the grid was complete, guaranteeing that their advert would exist for at least five years. Of course it's a bit hard to see what's being advertised if they only buy a couple of pixels…but it worked for him, and it is something of a piece of net-art now. Rumour has it that it may be available in poster form soon - another entrepreneurial idea from the lucky lad.

A less-than-commercial rival has since sprung up - the Zero Dollar Homepage, upon which you can't buy any of the pixels which are worth $0 anyway.

If you insist on frittering away hard-earned cash on such projects, we now have Travis Smith (another wannabe-rich student) and his Mile Wall site. Rates on this wall are way lower than for the Million Dollar Homepage, at a bargain $1 dollar for a square inch. Travis' idea is to outrageously ignore the whole politically-correct usability "you shouldn't have to scroll horizontally to read a webpage" thing which has forced large numbers of potentially-hard-working web designers to invent things like fluid CSS designs and other such geekwords. Rather he is intending to build a page that is 1 mile long in horizontal distance. This, he hopes, besides making him slightly rich, will buy him and any contributors a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Sadly business is apparently a little slow at present, but to give him credit he and his 120 participants have managed a scroll-button-breaking 22.8 foot wide page so far.