Pixel Advertising is the term given to visual advertisements on the web which have their cost calculated dependent on the number of pixels which they occupy.
Pixel advertising gained popularity in the last quarter of 2005 when British student Alex Tew created a web site named The Million Dollar Homepage, and solicited advertisers to buy ad space measured in pixels on the homepage. The price was set at $1 USD per pixel, and there were 1 million pixels of space available. In approximately five months all of the ad space was sold and Tew had made over one million dollars. This made news worldwide and gained public and business interest in pixel ads.
Many web sites which host pixel ads exist in a variety of compositions. As a general rule, they follow Tew's example by selling pixel ads in 100 pixel "blocks" because this is the smallest size to reasonably display anything meaningful, and remain easily clickable. A few newer sites have additional features that allows a larger image to appear when visitors hover the cursor over the small pixel ad, while others allow pixel ads to be bought for a temporary period of time.
Tew's million dollar success sparked the development of various ‘Do it yourself’ pixel scripts such as our Pixel-Ads-Script. These scripts made it possible for people with little knowledge or skills to implement a pixel ad system on their web site. This has sparked the growth of thousands of pixel web sites worldwide.