Remember the Million Dollar Homepage? Eight years later, it’s still alive, but as with all things internet, it’s not quite as healthy as it once was. In fact, 22 per cent of the links it contains are now dead.
Originally conceived by Alex Tew as a means of financing his college education, each 10-by-10 pixel chunk of the webpage was sold off as advertising space at $US100 a pop. An early and rather cheeky precursor to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, it went viral and sold out in 138 days.
And it’s still online! But many of the links now point to websites that no longer exist. In fact, dead links account for 221,900 of the pixels on the site, as this GIF put together by Quartz — in full below — shows. Areas that turn pink are all dead. Gone. Finito. Kaput.
Actually, it’s worth pointing out that 23,200 links were dead from the get-go, because advertisers failed to provide URLs for the site (duh). So that means that, strictly speaking, about 20 per cent of the links have died in the past eight years. Still, that’s a solid reminder of digital transience and the fragility of all things internet. [Quartz]
