Is outbid.lol the modern Million Dollar Homepage?
Not quite, and the gap is the interesting part. Alex Tew sold space, and space runs out. A pay-to-rank board sells rank, and rank never does, which is why its price only climbs.
outbid.lol is rate-limiting us, so these are their figures as recorded on 24 August, 4 days ago. They resume updating the moment their API answers again.
That is what #1 costs on topple.lol right now, live. Any other spot starts at $1. No account, no listing fee — you pay, you appear, people click. The catch, stated plainly: every balance drains, so the spot is rented, not owned.
What Alex Tew actually did
In August 2005 a student put up one page with a million blank pixels on it and sold them at a dollar each, in ten-by-ten blocks, to pay for university. Each block became a small image linking somewhere. It sold out within five months and raised $1,037,100, the final thousand pixels going to an eBay auction for $38,100. He never had to build a second thing for it to work, and that is the part every imitator since has been chasing.
What the 2026 boards genuinely share with it
- One page is the whole product. No feed, no account, no algorithm. What you buy is a position on a page other people are already looking at.
- The novelty is the traffic. Nobody visited the Million Dollar Homepage for the ads, and nobody visits a bid board for the listings. They come to see the stunt, and the listings get looked at on the way past.
- You buy it outright. No auction house, no sales call, no minimum spend. A card and a link, in under a minute.
- The scoreboard is public. Both put the money on display, which is most of why people keep checking back.
Where the comparison breaks
The Million Dollar Homepage sold space. There were exactly a million pixels, every buyer got their own, and no purchase ever devalued anyone else's. The supply was fixed, so the price was fixed too: a dollar a pixel, start to finish.
A pay-to-rank board sells rank, and rank is contested by definition. There is only ever one #1, and taking it means beating whoever holds it. Nothing caps that. On a board where bids are permanent, every new leader has to clear the last, so the price of the top spot ratchets up and never comes back down. Tew's page could only ever raise a million dollars. A leaderboard has no such ceiling, which sounds like an advantage until you notice what it does to the price of getting in.
The numbers, side by side
| Million Dollar Homepage | outbid.lol | |
|---|---|---|
| Year | 2005 | 2026 |
| Sold | A million pixels | Rank on one board |
| Price | $1 a pixel, fixed | Beat the leader by $1, uncapped |
| Taken | $1,037,100 | $189,459 |
| Supply | Ran out in five months | Never runs out |
| Ends when | The last pixel sells | #1 costs more than anyone will pay |
2005 figures are the documented public record. The outbid.lol figure is computed from its own public ranking API and dated above, not quoted from anyone. On that count the modern version has reached about 18% of the original, and the original did it in 2005 dollars.
The flaw they both inherit
Both sell something permanent, and permanence is what eventually kills the page. The Million Dollar Homepage stopped being worth visiting the day it filled up: nothing changed after that, and over the years a good share of the links it sold stopped resolving, so the grid became a picture of an internet that no longer exists. A permanent-bid leaderboard freezes the other way round. It never fills, but the price of the visible top climbs past what a normal buyer would spend, and once the top stops changing hands there is nothing to come back for.
Same ending, opposite causes: one is full, the other is too expensive.
Common questions
What was the Million Dollar Homepage?
A single web page selling a million pixels at a dollar each, in blocks of ten by ten, put up by Alex Tew in August 2005 to pay for university. Buyers got a tiny image linking to their site. It sold out inside five months and raised $1,037,100, the last thousand pixels going for $38,100 in an eBay auction.
Is outbid.lol the modern version of it?
Partly. Both sell a spot on one page, both are bought outright, and in both the novelty is the product. But the Million Dollar Homepage sold space, which runs out, and a pay-to-rank board sells rank, which does not. outbid.lol has taken $189,459 so far against the original's $1,037,100, and in 2005 dollars at that.
Why did the Million Dollar Homepage stop being interesting?
Because it finished. Once the last pixel sold there was nothing left to watch, and the page became a static picture of one week in 2005. Plenty of the sites it linked to went offline in the years after, so a good part of the grid now points nowhere. Permanence is what made it sellable and also what made it a museum.
What is the flaw both share?
Selling something forever. The Million Dollar Homepage ran out of pixels; a permanent-bid leaderboard runs out of reachable prices, because every new leader has to clear the last one and nothing ever comes back down. Both end up frozen, one because it is full and the other because it is too expensive.
Has anyone fixed it?
That is what topple.lol is for, and we are hardly neutral about it. Bids there are balances that drain with time and with the clicks they earn, so the top spot keeps falling back into reach and the page never finishes. Whether that is better or just different is a fair thing to argue about.
Full disclosure: this page is run by topple.lol, which is one of these boards and built on the argument above. Bids here are balances that drain, so the top keeps reopening instead of pricing itself out. You can decide for yourself whether that solves anything.
Also searched as outbit.lol, outbid.lo, outbid.lok and "outbid lol". Same site: outbid.lol.