RyanBibbey.com

Web 2.0 Pixel Page

As you may have noticed from my other posts, I have come to the conclusion that the concept of pixel ads is a throwaway. At least in its incarnation at milliondollarhomepage.com. The problem as I see it is that there is no real draw for the user to come to the site, other than to see the amazing mess of pixels that make up it’s home page. The most profitable web ventures make it because their real estate is useful for a large number of people. That said, it is hard to imagine the concept being much more than a 1 hit wonder, which is fine with me.

I’ve considered ways to make the concept viable as a business and have come up with few ideas on that topic. The best I think I have mulled out is taking the concept and applying a Google spin to it. Create a categorization technique to label each submitted pixel/link, combine them into a single banner or thumbnail and contextually place them on publisher sites. Charge a nominal setup fee ($5) and then start the bidding wars for not only internal banner pixel placement, but for targeted sites and keywords. You could use the home page to display the pixels ala MDHP, and also allow bidding on the page.

I’m sort of disappointed in the lack of tech prowess the MDHP page shows, but nevertheless it was obviously not intended to be cutting edge in that sense so I considered how to technically make a pixel ad page work better and this naturally goes towards Web 2.0 tendencies. A Web 2.0 approach here would be to use AJAX/RSS techniques to load up the categorized or home page targeted ads via XmlHttpRequest, parsing each and positioning each dynamically. Then you can automate the process for each visit and check for updates to the ad list/images, applying them to the home page as necessary and dynamically. Then the page loads up without images and starts populating after the response with the ad list is received. The RSS feed itself could be used to syndicate the ad feed as well.

Sounds almost useful to me – and might actually be a viable business. Maybe it even exists already. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if someone out there has already considered these things and taken care of them. If not, cut me in on the deal, eh?