Everybody keeps saying, "what a simple idea, how easy it was to do" what Alex Tew done. But that is not true. There are hundreds of thousands of personal websites out there offering paid links on their website long before
his. They may have had a similar format or an alternate approach to selling space but none ever making any real money.
Milliondollarhomepage didn't succeed because they had a single brilliant idea, it succeeded because a journalist with a very reputable IT magazine, with a massive readership base, printed the story on their website, when like millions of other personal websites, milliondollarhomepage had virtually no links on it, but yet managed to get pumped on their site when all it had were a few banners with obvious affiliate link banners to casinos and a couple of hosts.
As far as I can figure out it was Tim Richardson from theregister.co.uk magazine who published this non story at a time when the mdhp site was nothing more than virtually a blank page with a few affiliate banners , the design not unlike theregisters.co.uk sister site regdeveloper.co.uk.
No, this site would never have gone anywhere unless it had gotten the coverage like it did from a huge magazine like theregister. Well done to Alex Tew for convincing the journalist at such a large online IT online magazine to run with a story about a blank website. Lets face it, without the journalists' ability to print the story on such a reputable online mag, mdhp and Alex Tew would be unheard off.
So the key is not about having a simple idea like everybody claims, it is the ability to get it published on a large reputable media source and the rest is history. It was such a nonsense of a story at the time it was first released that it was the disbelief of ordinary individuals when it got published in the first place that carried it from one forum to another and one news source to another creating the viral element.
TheRegister.co.uk is responsible for the success of MDHP, not Alex Tew. So for all you budding entrepreneurs with any half baked scheme, drop the journalist a line, who knows, you could be next.