Australian designer finds a million dollars inside ‘cube’ of 100

MEDIA RELEASE COURTESY MILLION DOLLARCU.BE

Take an idea everyone says can never be repeated, add a fresh new twist, a dash of larrikin humour, some good design and writing, and Australian designer Robert Black plans to turn web traffic for his clients into one million dollars. His website, MillionDollarCu.be, has just passed the major milestone of breaking even by selling over 6000 pixels to online advertisers wanting to bring visitors to their own websites.

From the outback to out front – an Australian designer finds a million dollars inside ‘cube’ of 100.

Selling a million pixels for $1 each has only been done once before - three years ago in the UK by Alex Tew, whose clients saw a massive return in traffic for the pixels they bought, but that site has long been sold out. Robert Black, an Australian designer, explains, “Since then no one has really tried hard to be the ‘first to be second’. The trick is to catch the imagination of both advertisers and the wider internet, which just takes a lot of creativity and elbow grease.”

Key to Mr Black’s plan is the quirky observation that he could fit one million pixels into a tiny cube measuring just 100 pixels wide on each side. “It’s incredibly counter-intuitive, but 100 by 100 by 100, the ‘cube’ of 100, gives you 1 million pixels, and each of those is now for sale to online advertisers for US$1 per pixel at MillionDollarCu.be. That’s maths for you… sometimes it throws a curve-ball.”

Having now sold over 6000 pixels the MillionDollarCu.be website has paid for its development, and Mr Black claims this proves that at least some advertisers support a flat-fee model of online advertising that’s ‘set and forget simple’ with no extra costs, unlike Google’s pay-per-click AdWords service. At its peak, the original milliondollarhomepage attracted curious visitors in the hundreds of thousands a day to click its flat-fee ads, which in turn led to many advertisers on the site seeing their traffic leap 100-fold.

But after Alex Tew’s site sold out three years ago it quickly became accepted wisdom that selling a million pixels can’t be done a second time, as unoriginal attempts at copying him floundered, selling few if any pixels. Mr Black, unfazed, points out that “years later, now is a perfect time for the MillionDollarCu.be to recapture people’s imagination precisely because it’s so unexpected, and the whole site is an original twist designed from scratch with humour and personality.” Selling 6000 pixels in the first few weeks is a major coup for the site.

Wayne Rankin, one of the fathers of modern Australian graphic design bought 900 pixels in the MillionDollarCu.be to link to his own website saying, “I like the spirit of the Cube. Grabbing people’s attention takes that kind of audacity.” Mr Rankin, whose earlier company Swish Group still stands as Australia’s largest ever web developer, explained that, “Almost every business today has a website, and we all want more visitors, but that’s the hard part. A website like the MillionDollarCu.be makes getting people’s attention a trivial matter.”

Mr Black cheekily sums up MillionDollarCu.be’s pitch to web advertisers as, “Buy another part of internet history… the first site to be second. $1 per pixel, with unlimited traffic until 10/10/10.”

You can visit the MillionDollarCu.be and see the ‘cube’ of 100 for yourself at http://MillionDollarCu.be