When he flew to Saskatchewan to sign the deed, he was met at the house by Kipling’s mayor, members of Parliament, and, of course, a red-coated Mountie. (“A mountie,” MacDonald chuckles, still marveling at the utter Canadian-ness of it all.) He’s become Saskatchewan’s biggest celebrity since Dick Assman, the Regina petrol-station owner who rocketed to fame in 1995, thanks to David Letterman.
And that, much more than the monetary value of a modest house in the middle of nowhere, is why MacDonald did this. Not to be the new Dick Assman, but to create a great story. “The amount of time I put into this” — about 3500 hours, he guesses — “is totally disproportionate to the monetary value of the house. But it’s the story that’s the real reward. I got to meet a lot of people.”
He also scored a book deal with Random House. And the one-red-paper-clip story has been optioned by DreamWorks. If both projects work out, the money they generate will make those hours well worth it.
(By the way: Kyle’s throwing a housewarming party in Kipling the same weekend of the auditions. Dick Assman is invited. You are too. BYOP.)
ALEX TEW'S MILLION DOLLAR HOMEPAGE: raised a million bucks in less than a year |
A buck a pixel
Alex Tew needed money for university. The 22-year-old from Cricklade, Wiltshire, England, was barely a month away from starting his degree program and already £4000 in debt. “I was not too happy about my financial situation,” he says over the phone from London.So instead of just accepting it as a necessary evil, he sat up late one night, jotting some fundraising ideas in a notebook. “One of the things I wrote down was, ‘How can I become a millionaire?’ I sat there thinking for a while, and about 20 minutes later this crazy idea popped into my head. In order to become a millionaire I would sell a million pixels on the screen, and I’d sell them for a dollar each.”
Shazam. The Million Dollar Homepage was born. It was a crazy idea, with ostensibly little chance of actually working. But Tew “knew that things that were completely crazy would often get attention. And I knew that if I could generate some attention, then the pixels I was selling would have value.”
Still, he was far from convinced the site would live up to its name. “My original thinking was that if I aim high … If I aim for a million dollars but only get one or two percent, then that would still be ten or twenty thousand dollars, that would be a huge amount of money for me. So I kind of went into it thinking I had nothing to lose.”
He had no idea. Between the site’s going live and the auctioning off of the final 1000 pixels for $38,100, more than 3000 entities — from online casinos to novelty shops to free iPod gimmicks to absinthe vendors to political blogs to mp3 download sites to Jewish dating services to the London Times to a site selling pixels for 20 cents — rushed to snatch up online real estate. It took just four and a half months. “It took off so quickly. It’s still kind of surreal,” says Tew. “A year on, it still hasn’t sunk in.” (He says he “could have probably created a whole page just of adult sites” that contacted him, but, knowing the publicity the page would generate — and depended on — he opted to keep it clean.)
