Interview with Milliondollarvoippage.

First of please introduce yourself and your site to our readers?

My name is Paul and I run Milliondollarvoippage.

Most people have been inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage, where did you get your inspiration from?

We were inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage. We are lowly software engineers working for hours on end for years, hardly able to save up for retirement, and this fellow just comes along and make $1M by creating a very simple we site. What a lucky guy! We just had to copy the idea if for no other reason than to serve as a reminder to bang our heads against a wall from time to time.

What software do you use to run your pixel page and why did you choose it?

We used a tooltip script from walterzorn.com, but otherwise it’s all our code.

What makes your site different or special, what angle have you taken for your Pixel page?

While we’ve not looked at every site out there, we decided to create a similar page with a narrow focus on the industry in which we’ve been working for years: Voice over IP. The idea is that, like the Million Dollar Homepage, pioneering VoIP companies can buy a permanent place in history with an ad spot on our page.

The original pixel page generated traffic mainly through viral marketing mainly spawned by media interest, how do you generate traffic to your site?

We’re software engineers, not marketing people. That’s why we still engineer software and, quite likely, will continue to engineer software for a long time. Nonetheless, we’re hopeful that blind luck will come our way.

What do you offer potential advertisers, how much do you charge and how much traffic do you envisage an advertiser could generate by advertising with you?

This is where it gets more interesting. We charge basic $1/pixel, but we do plan to give advertisers more: for as long as we can keep the site alive, it will stay out there for the world to enjoy. We will purpose a certain amount of funding so that the site will be available for at least the next 10 years.

Further, if we are successful at selling enough ads, we plan to take a part of that ad revenue and use it to drive traffic to the site through traditional Internet advertising. So, in effect, advertisers who pay for space on our site will get a return through advertisements we place directing people to those ads. Why do we do this? It’s quite entertaining to us.

Currently the top 5 Alexa ranked pixel sites enjoy a lot of interest from the public. How long do you think this will last, is there a long term future for pixel pages?

If we could answer this question, perhaps we would have had enough insight to create the first $1M home page. Why so many people would be compelled to visit a web site with a bunch of unrelated ads makes little sense to us. OK, the first one did: it was a novelty. However, we think that any site that might follow should have a specific theme. If you want to go shopping for a car, one should visit the MillionDollarCarPage.com or some such. (That domain is still available for anybody wanting to get into this vertical advertising market!).

Besides your own pixel page, which other pixel page do you secretly admire and why?

We really do admire the MillionDollarHomePage.com. The idea, had it come to us, would have resulted in going nowhere. But this fellow was able to take this simple idea and quite literally make $1M. You really have to admire that!

Thanks for your time in answering these questions. Before you go are there any comments you want to impart to our pixel hungry readership?

While we have tried to have fun, both with the web site and with the comments in this interview, we do want folks to know that we are committed to operating the Million Dollar VoIP Page for the next 10 years and longer if possible. We really are software engineers and we wish we could find a way to help fund our retirement, because we don’t have anything else! As it stands now, we will probably be working for a very long time. Even if we earn $1M, we’re the type of people who would still keep on working and trying to balance that work with some fun, but the $1M would give us some peace of mind.