Q: Can you tell me where I can find a program so that I can make my own pixel advertising home page? Or advise on what program I need to do this?
A: Pixel advertising, where the cost of advertisements on a webpage is calculated according to the number of pixels they occupy, first gained popularity in late 2005. British student Alex Tew built a site called The Million Dollar Homepage, with each pixel on the site for sale at US$1. In general pixel ads are sold as 100 pixel blocks (i.e. 10×10) since this is the smallest size that can display something meaningful on the screen.
There are various tools you can get to help you build a pixel advertising page but first you need a level of access to the webserver that that allows you to install and run scripts. Most free webspace and low-cost hosting deals don’t provide this so you need to make sure you get an appropriate account. Typically this means one that offers PHP (Personal Home Page scripting language), GD Library (Graphics Draw) and SQL (Structured Query Language) access and allows you to manage file and folder permissions. Alternatively you could build your own server, pretty much any Windows machine will do and you can download the open source Apache HTTP Server software. But again you need to have an ISP account that permits you to run it — ideally this requires a fixed IP address. And if you’re running your own server it’s a good idea to have a hardware firewall to guard against hacking and a UPS to maximise uptime.
With an appropriate server available all you need to build your pixel ad page is some scripting software, the GPix Pixel Ad Script is free. Or there are various paid-for options such as Million Dollar Pixel Script or PixelAds. Take a look at the websites for these and they’ll tell you the precise server requirements they need to run.
Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage started the trend for pixel advertising
Originally featured in PCU110