Welcome to the Six Million Dollar Web Page – Internet and Charitable History in the Making

The Concept

The concept for this website is actually a fusion of ideas.  After hearing about the breakthrough phenomenon of Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage, a number of ideas came to mind about starting a new Internet business.  Alex Tew, a young man living in the UK, had a great idea to create a Web Page and sell advertising by the pixel in order to fund his college years.  The idea took off.  Within four months, his site has enjoyed tremendous traffic and has sold one million dollars of advertising.  Since then, many other websites have been created selling pixel ads.  Some have seen some success, and others have not.  Within this short time period, the marketplace has grown very quickly.

The Pixel Advertising Phenomenon
Being an advertising and marketing professional, I loved the idea of pixel advertising.  It works on a number of different levels.  First and foremost, it provides traffic to the sites that are advertising.  It creates a new mosaic work of art that is interesting to view and provides a new form of Internet search in a “click the pixel” format.  People are clicking here and there to see what they get.  Each click is similar to opening a Chinese fortune cookie.  You are never quite sure what you are going to get.  In addition to the direct traffic benefit, website owners and webmasters can enjoy the page rank that is passed to the site.  Also, these tiny ads can offer new links with relevant text pointing to your site, increasing your link popularity for your site for a reasonable price and extended time frame.

A Fusion of Ideas
Moving on to the fusion of ideas concept, this website took the initial concept of the pixel ad and added some additional elements to it.  The idea of the “Six Million Dollar Man” entered my mind.  I kept thinking about the opening narration from the TV show, where Richard Anderson’s character Oscar Goldman said the following:  “Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.”  This got me thinking about a Six Million Dollar Web Page.  It could be built better, too. 

Make It Better
So, you might ask, how could it be better than the original?  The original concept is great.  Do not get me wrong.  It is a historical idea for the Internet.  But, I was thinking that it could be made even better.  That is where the next part of the idea came in.  I asked this question:  How about if we helped a lot of people?  What if we took the concept of pixel advertising and added the concept of donating 50% to charity?  A powerful idea like that could help an awful lot of people.  I started thinking about people who could use help.  To tie in with the idea of the Six Million Dollar Web Page, I wanted to target six groups that could use some help.  Each advertiser would have a chance to choose the group that would receive 50% of their advertising dollars.  In addition to the website traffic and page rank boost, they would also be able to enjoy a public relations boost as they enhance their relationship as a good corporate citizen.  But, people that buy space on the Six Million Dollar Web Page do not have to have a website that they want to promote, they may just want to help a good cause, and that is great, too.  We will even offer memorial spaces where we can host a web page as a memorial to a loved one and link to those pages if desired.

Charity One: Stay-at-home Mom’s (and their families)
My wife, a stay-at-home mom, is a social worker by trade.  She has experience with helping families from working at Arkansas Children’s Hospital and the Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS).  She said that she always thought it would be great if some organization offered grants for stay-at-home moms.  It would be a way to help families fund their lifestyle while only one parent worked.  These days, many families find that it can be very hard to manage on just one income, ourselves included.  I agreed and thought that would be a very worthwhile group to help.  It is a group that flies under the radar of typical grant or scholarship funding, and there is no place that I am aware of that offers donations to individual families to help the mother stay at home to take care of the kids.  Families will be asked to apply for funding help through the site and to tell us what the help would mean to them. What better thing can you do than help the family?  So, that became the first side of the cube for the Six Million Dollar Web Page. 

Charity Two:  Families Needing Help with Medical Bills
We talked about some more groups that could use some help and funding.  The next group that came to mind was families for medical bills.  Again, this group flies under the radar for many funding opportunities.  I work at UAMS managing their websites and I see numerous requests for people seeking medical help without the finances or the insurance to help cover the costs for the procedures and/or medications they need.  As the UAMS webmaster, I am a business and computer guy.  I can not dispense medical advice, treat patients or prescribe medicines.  I can, however, send people to the right place to help them get financial assistance or help them find which physician or clinic can help them.  The sad truth is that there is much more need than there are resources available to help.  Despite my best intentions, there is only so much I can do.  With the assistance of my wife, family, friends, co-workers and like-minded advertisers, this website gives me an opportunity to help more directly.  I am firmly convinced that this is an epidemic that is sweeping the country at this time.  It may not be an illness or disease without cure or vaccination, but it can be devastating to many people just the same.  With the cost of insurance continually going up as well as the cost of medical care, I do not see this problem going away any time soon.  This group became the next choice for help through the site:  families that needed help with medical bills.  As with the first group, we would provide the assistance on a direct basis to families that submit application for aid to us as we can provide aid from advertising revenue through the site. 

Charity Three:  Helping the Less Fortunate in America
The next group could be strongly related to our group needing help with medical bills, but is an even broader group.  It is no secret that there are many families that work very hard but still face financial difficulty every day.  There are single parent households that could use some help and entire households that find every day to be a financial struggle.  With advertiser support, we hope to help some families ease their financial burden.  We will be asking for families to submit application for aid, and we will do our best to help where we can.  In addition to helping families directly, some of our donations may go to churches, community centers and other institutions that can help to distribute the aid in an efficient manner.

Charity Four:  Helping to Feed the Homeless
Another group that could use some help can be seen on many streets in many American cities.  They are the homeless.  For just a moment, try to imagine what it may be like to be homeless in America.  Think about the number of people that were homeless immediately after Hurricane Katrina.  Through no fault of their own, they suddenly found themselves without homes and with very limited resources.  I hope that our advertising support can help us to fund groups that can help those in situations like that. 

Imagine that for whatever reason, you find it impossible to maintain a steady job and earn enough to support yourself in an apartment, room, whatever.  There may be many reasons that a person becomes homeless.  I don’t have the answer, but I do know that if I had tragedy befall me to the point that it became impossible for me to support myself, I would greatly appreciate any kindness and aid that would come my way.  This is a group greatly in need of assistance, and through advertising revenues, we hope to help as much as possible.  We will be looking for organizations to distribute money to that can be effective in helping the homeless.  Shelters and organizations that provide supplies to the homeless will be the first to receive assistance from the Six Million Dollar Web Page.

Charity Five:  Computers for Kids K-12
My wife and I live in Little Rock, Arkansas and we hear the news about schools needing funding.  In Arkansas, it has made many news reports about how our K-12 public education system needs help.  We would like to help in this area as well.  Today’s kids that grow up with computers and other modern technology can grasp technology ideas with incredible speed.  It is truly amazing.  This part of the site would have a double goal.  We would like to help provide computers to schools for the students, but we would also like to help put more computers in more family homes.  More computers in more homes and in more schools will build a more educated workforce and will be better for individual communities and America, overall.

Charity Six:  Student Scholarships for Colleges and Universities
As part of my work at UAMS, I host and mentor a number of teams of Information Technology majors and minors from our local four-year university, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR).  I usually host or help host one or two IT minor teams each semester and one or two Information Science major teams for an academic year.  This provides me a great opportunity to see what skills today’s students are bringing to the table.  I learn a lot from my college teams.  As part of the partnership between UAMS and UALR, I am currently the Chairperson for the Information Science Advisory Council for the UALR CyberCollege.  Through these associations, I realize that there will always be a need for student scholarship funding.  Our sixth area provides a 50-50 split of funding to help fund student scholarships.  As in the other direct aid areas, we ask that students or potential students submit application for assistance.  They will be asked to describe their academic goals, plans for after college, how they are currently funding college and what current financial assistance they receive from sources outside the family.

Promoting the Site – Why You Should Advertise with the Six Million Dollar Web Page
Outside of the knowledge that 50% of your advertising expense will be donated to a charitable cause, you will also realize the benefits of traffic to your site and additional links popularity from new image links with your specified ALT text pointing to your site. 

We realize that we are not the first pixel ad site on the Internet, nor will we be the last.  There are many other sites asking for your advertising dollar.  We believe our concept is sound and very open to promotion.  We will be utilizing funding to help advertise the site and drive more constant traffic to the pages with your links.  There will also be very many public relations opportunities. 

There are numerous opportunities for issuing press releases, and each should help continue to build traffic to the site.  In addition to the PR traffic, we also hope to have a very active community through our forums and applicants who will help spread the word through viral marketing.   As part of the application process for funding, we will ask for applicants to help spread the word of the site by asking friends and family to issue a vote of support for them to receive aid.  We believe that this blend of marketing and public relations will help the site remain visible in the public eye and continue to drive traffic for years.

We will also publish the results of our fund raising efforts for our selected charities and families.  We will publish the amount of money contributed and the recipient.  We hope to publicize our contributions through issuing press releases and other media activities.

How You Can Advertise
It is very easy to advertise with the Six Million Dollar Web Page.  Click here or on the page you would like to advertise on and select the Advertise Here button.  Tell us where you would like to have your ad on the page by counting the number of rows across and down and how many pixels you would like for your ad.  Or, you may allow us to select where to place your ad, if you wish.  Each pixel costs $1 with $.50 of the cost of your ad going to the charity group of your choice.  Your ad will appear on that charity group page.  There is a minimum ad cost of $100, which is a 10 pixel by 10 pixel ad (one block). If you are buying for page rank or link popularity as well as charitable donation, a single block ad will do the trick. 

You will also need to send us an email with at attachment of your graphic sized to the ad size purchased.  Please reference your name as entered on the form and the email address of your PayPal account so that we may match the graphic with the advertiser.  We hope to improve this process shortly, but we will start out with a manual process in the early phase of bringing on advertisers.

To better get your message across and help your charitable group the most, buy as many blocks as you would like!  It will normally take 24-48 hours to process the hour and review the ad.  Ads showing nudity or of an adult nature will not be accepted.  If the ad is not accepted, your money will be refunded.

Thank you for taking the time to read about our fundraising efforts to help these six very worthwhile groups of people through advertising sales.  We think this allows us to build a partnership with our advertisers that will extend to those that we help.

We look forward to hearing from you!

All the best,

Shane Tripcony

Co-Founder of The Six Million Dollar Web Page

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