Remember Million Dollar Homepage?  The website’s owner sold 1,000,000 pixels for $1 each.  It worked because the idea was new and generated a ton of press.  You can’t repeat this now because the concept is no longer newsworthy and nobody is willing to pay $1 per pixel again to a copycat site.

But what if this concept were applied to a superbowl commercial?  According to wikipedia, minimum quality standard 4:3 TV broadcasts are 640 x 480 pixels and can be as low as 24 frames per second, which works out to:

• 640 x 480 = 307,200 pixels per frame
• x 24 frames = 7,372,800 pixels per second
• x 30 sec = 221,184,000 pixels in a 30 second commercial

If you sold every pixel for $0.05, that equals over $11 million.  Last year the average cost for a 30 second superbowl commercial was $3 million… pretty good margin.