Over the last month a new website created by 21 year old student (Alex Tew) has had a phenomenal impact on the internet branding world. You may have heard of milliondollarhomepage.com. If not, it is a very simple concept for online branding. Advertisers might buy pixels on the homepage for $1 a pixel. The minimum order is 100 pixels and with this the advertiser gets a small image that links from the Milliondollarhomepage to the advertisers page .

Now this alone isnt what made the page successful. Granted its a unique twist on internet marketing, but lets be honest its hardly remarkable. People have been selling spaces for banners on web sites for many years. For this site to succeed it needed one key ingredient, and that is visitors . Hundreds of thousands of many people needed to visit this page to give the advertisers value for funds .

So the young student who came up with the idea submitted a press release, and sold a story like any nice marketer would. How he was only 21 and came up with this simple web page to pay his way through university. Fortunately for him the worlds press found his release and published it, as it was a grand story. This meant more many people visited the page , and the website traffic increased. In turn more journalists picked up on the story and published it. The result was a viral explosion in visitors which meant many everybody bought advertising space and it is fair to say the page has been highly successful.

So is this the new selling medium of the internet? I am afraid this author doesnt believe so. Once the hype starts to die down, and the story is no longer new, the press will begin to publish fewer articles on it, and less all the people will visit the page . This in turn will lead to even fewer articles being published in the worlds press, leading to even fewer visitors. This cycle will continue and what originally made this web site successful (viral advertising) will ultimately lead to its death.

What may internet marketers learn from this? The best way to promote any new internet venture is to generate an interesting story about it, submit articles and press releases, and if the story is good enough, watch the viral explosion in visitors.

Of course for long term growth the new page or service has to be great enough to provide assessment of worth to visitors, and not just a fad that captures peoples short term interest. I wish Alex Tew all the best, but I think he too will accept that this is not a long term business that may go anywhere from here.