[via Tom Peters]

You have surely heard about this story:

Last September college student Alex Tew launched a new business to fund his college education. It was called “The Million Dollar Homepage.” His scheme was to sell advertising space on a 1 million pixel homepage to advertisers for $1 per pixel. Believe it or not, The Million Dollar Homepage is sold out.

Very strange, typical “one-shot-action” to my point of view, with quite a lot of buzz. And definitely nothing to do with marketing! If this is really cool for Alex on the long-run… It seems that the “Dark Side” effects are coming.

How anyone could think this is great marketing is beyond me. It represents the worst of clutter culture, where the customer is so overwhelmed by noise that nobody (except Alex Tew) can possibly get something out of it. […]

So Alex Tew seemed like the only winner, until some extortionists threatened to hack his site if he didn’t pay them. He refused and they shut down his site for 5 days, and now he’s being sued by advertisers whose ads weren’t viewable during that time. Yes, these litigants are just looking for more “PR value.”