The man behind the million dollar homepage 11 years later
<i>But Tew was the first to do it, which left a lot of people wondering why they didn’t think of it first.</i><p>Lots of people thought of it, but discounted it because it was a dumb idea, missing one crucially important ingredient: page-views. Anybody can put up a web site, it&#x27;s getting people to look at it that&#x27;s hard. And once people are looking at it, it&#x27;s easy to sell ad space. What no one could have known, including Tew, is that the story was going to get picked up by the media, which would generate his page-views for him. Nowadays, lots of people are trying to hack the concept of virality, which despite the name is really more a matter of climbing the media hierarchy rather than spreading in some kind of peer-to-peer manner. You get picked up by a few small tweeters or bloggers, then by bigger tweeters and bloggers, and then by major media, and---voila! You cash in and look like a genius. But everyone else is trying to do the same thing, and no one has a repeatable recipe for virality, so in the end it&#x27;s largely a matter of luck.