How I got a free ad on milliondollarhomepage.com

A few years ago I got my hands on an ad on milliondollarhomepage.com for free. How? I scanned each domain on the site, checking to see if that domain is dead or not. If so, I could then manually check if the domain is available.

If you’re unfamiliar with milliondollarhomepage.com, here’s the Wikipedia link.

The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks.

To make this easier, I wrote a simple Python script:

import requests
import re
import httplib2
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup, SoupStrainer

http = httplib2.Http()
status, response = http.request('http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/')

domains = []

f = open("domains.txt", "a")

for link in BeautifulSoup(response, parse_only=SoupStrainer('area')):
    if link.has_attr('href'):
        domain = re.search("^(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:[^@\n]+@)?(?:www\.)?([^:\/\n?]+)", link['href']).group()
        domain = domain.replace("http://", "")
        domain = domain.replace("https://", "")
        domain = domain.replace("www.", "")

        if domain not in domains:
            try:
                r = requests.head(link['href'])
            except requests.ConnectionError:
                domains.append(domain)
                f.write(domain + "\n")
                print(domain)

f.close()

This is some very rough python code, but it serves it purpose. Also, I don’t see why the domains for the ads will ever change, given the site is so old now. So I’ve got the list here of all the domains.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I managed to get a teeny ad next to the big “Free hosting” ad. The domain for this is freemusicandmovies.com. I don’t have anything interesting on the website and I don’t intend on doing anything with it; this was just a fun experiment and a way to own a small piece of internet history.

You can view the full repo here.