Top pixels live pixel sites:

As the owner of a pixel based web site I decided to do a little research to ascertain whether or not I should continue to promote Arts-Crafts-HobbiesandDIY using the present pixel page as the home page, or if it would be more beneficial to find a new angle by replacing the pixel grid with a standard home page, thus eliminating the grid as the first thing that visitors see when they enter the site.

I decided that the best way to do this was to randomly pick 1000 pixel based URLs, then visit each site in order to find an average result.

A) How many of the thousand still existed

B) How many pixels they had sold on their main pay per pixel grid.

C) Had they abandoned the Pixel site and replaced it with a sponsored page/parked domain or

D) Had they just disappeared into oblivion.

To save time and avoid visiting the same URL‘s  I randomly selected a Million Pixel Directory then followed random links on the list.

The lists I chose to use were www.pixelsitelinks.com and www.thepixelwars.com. I also decided that in order to give me a more accurate assessment with regard to the type of pixel site I own, I would try to stick to a basic pay per pixel grid format. I know there are millions of variations on the concept but I decided that the standard grid option was probably the best option for me.

I would also only use sites that showed stats with regard to the amount of  pixels sold as this could give me some idea of their popularity as click through counters and advert stats are not always that reliable as server crash's, backups and general hardware/software  problems can all dramatically effect the results. Not to mention of course what I call clocking which is the easiest way to up the stats on a page and get yourself higher up the list.

I also decided that I would ignore Error 404 reports (page cannot be found) as from my own experience they can be caused by a simple spelling mistake in the URL. I also ignored the forbidden, unauthorised, or do not have permission message type pages although I have never really understood why anyone would advertise a site in the public domain only to inform you that you were unauthorised or forbidden to view it. I also chose to ignore any blank pages because I had no idea of their intended content.

Very early indications were showing that the million dollar homepage concept was perhaps not "the new black" of advertising at all, but was in fact what we all suspected. Nothing more than a one hit wonder. I'm not saying that every site will fail, I'm determined mine won't but early indications are looking pretty bleak.

Within the first 19 Top URLs I began to notice a continual occurrence of sponsored/parked domain pages or errors.

By the time I had hit the 100 mark I had only found 38 sites that still had a pixel grid displayed as the homepage despite being in the top 100 URLs. This meant that just over a third were still live. 35 sites were displaying a sponsored page in one form or the other and the remaining 27 were coming up as server errors (mainly ERROR 500 Internal server error) which indicated that perhaps they were no longer live and had indeed disappeared into oblivion.

By 200 I had only managed to find another 27 live sites displaying a grid. Things were not looking good. There were another 28 sponsored pages, along with 45 server errors .This gave a total of just 65 live grids out of 200 URLs.

Not to be put off I ploughed on through the lists until I reached 502. By this time I had only managed to find another 118 live grids giving me a total of 183 pixel sites still running out of what should have been 502.

This meant that only 36.5% of all the URLs I had visited still existed as pixel sites. 27.3% were sponsored pages with 32.5% being Error 500 along with 3.7% coming came back as various other error reports

 

 

I kept on going reaching 600 URL's but I could still only find another 15 sites that still displayed a grid. There where 47 sponsored ad pages, 36 Error 500 pages plus another 2 Error 504 pages.

However not to be put off, and not being a quitter I continued to the 1000 page target as that is what I had decided on.

By the 1000th URL I had only found 273 URL's with live pixel grids like the one displayed on my home page. That was just over 27%, a truly disappointing and yet a very realistic account of what I and millions of others surely expected from the start. Admittedly I had come across a few different concepts on the idea along the way but even they were so few and far between they wouldn't have had that dramatic effect on the figures if I had counted them as well.

 

 

 

A lot of other URLS on the lists were displaying standard home pages, redirects or new sites under the same names which indicated that these people had already realised that the million dollar homepage would never catch on. For me the figures below draw the same conclusion.

Almost 74% of 1001 URL's were no longer there in the form of a grid.

In total 28,746,131 pixels had been sold giving an average of 105,297.18 pixels sold per live grid. That meant on average 105 squares had been taken per grid. This also meant that realistically out of 1000 million dollar home pages only enough pixels had been sold to almost fill 29 grids. This was also ignoring the fact that possibly a large number of the adverts were self placed, in the form of affiliate or friendly placement.

 

 

 

 

Conclusion:

From the above results, despite being what seemed a great idea to me at the time of purchase, my milliondollar homepage site was not going to produce the desired results that I had hoped for. People and companies did not want to risk their hard earned money on pixel advertising despite all the efforts I was putting in on a daily basis. I had contacted hundreds of thousands of Art, Craft, Hobby and DIY sites to introduce my site. I had made what I considered to be great offers on my prices, I was constantly praised by potential customers for my professionalism and straight to the point approach, but was I earning an income from it? NO. There was no way I was going to see a reasonable return for my efforts unless I could find an alternative approach or use for the grid.

 

I have, since publishing this report noticed that more sites currently on the live pixel list are now returning ERROR 500 reports and so will for my own benefit continue to monitor their progress.

 

 

 

 

 

            

 Current live Pixel report,

 

 

 

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