I can still access <a href="http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/</a><p>I can't currently access the article at <a href="https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2017/07/21/a-million-squandered-the-million-dollar-homepage-as-a-decaying-digital-artifact/" rel="nofollow">https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2017/07/21/a-million-squand...</a><p>[Insert joke about irony here.]
>Of the 2,816 links that embedded on the page (accounting for a total of 999,400 pixels), 547 are entirely unreachable at this time. A further 489 redirect to a different domain or to a domain resale portal, leaving 1,780 reachable links<p>Looking at the million dollar homepage, many of the links <i>were never valid</i>:<p><a href="http://paid" rel="nofollow">http://paid</a> & reserved/<p><a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> paid and reserved - accent designer clothing/<p><a href="http://reserved" rel="nofollow">http://reserved</a> for edna moran/<p><a href="http://paid" rel="nofollow">http://paid</a> & reserved for paul tarquinio/ (1200 pixels)<p><a href="http://pending" rel="nofollow">http://pending</a> order/<p>These links are all shown in plain red ("link to unreachable or entirely empty pages") in the "visualization of link rot," so it looks like the authors didn't account for invalid URLs.
Gwern has a good summary of the research in this: <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs" rel="nofollow">https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs</a><p>>In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic literature to be even worse (Spinellis, 2003, Lawrence et al., 2001). Nelson and Allen (2002) examined link rot in digital libraries and found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.
Bruce Schneier remarks that one friend experienced 50% linkrot in one of his pages over less than 9 years (not that the situation was any better in 1998), and that his own blog posts link to news articles that go dead in days2; Vitorio checks bookmarks from 1997, finding that hand-checking indicates a total link rot of 91% with only half of the dead available in sources like the Internet Archive; the Internet Archive itself has estimated the average lifespan of a Web page at 100 days. A Science study looked at articles in prestigious journals; they didn’t use many Internet links, but when they did, 2 years later ~13% were dead3. The French company Linterweb studied external links on the French Wikipedia before setting up their cache of French external links, and found - back in 2008 - already 5% were dead. (The English Wikipedia has seen a 2010-2011 spike from a few thousand dead links to ~110,000 out of ~17.5m live links.) The dismal studies just go on and on and on (and on). Even in a highly stable, funded, curated environment, link rot happens anyway. For example, about 11% of Arab Spring-related tweets were gone within a year (even though Twitter is - currently - still around).
Decaying in more than one way. The JS files on milliondollarhomepage.com start with:<p><pre><code> /*
FILE ARCHIVED ON 5:47:20 Aug 6, 2015 AND RETRIEVED FROM THE
INTERNET ARCHIVE ON 20:45:17 Aug 24, 2015.
JAVASCRIPT APPENDED BY WAYBACK MACHINE, COPYRIGHT INTERNET ARCHIVE.
ALL OTHER CONTENT MAY ALSO BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT (17 U.S.C.
SECTION 108(a)(3)).
*/
</code></pre>
I guess someone didn't keep backups?
The Million Dollar Homepage is not decaying (it is still serving its million dollar purpose) - it is the Web itself that has decayed. The brittleness of URIs is on full display. "Cool URLs don't change," but most of these URLs were never cool: they had to rent coolness from Internet cool kid Alex Tew.
The article seems to be suggesting that the Million Dollar Home Page has in some sense failed to fulfill it's promise because many of the links are now dead. I don't follow that logic at all. To me it seems that the MDHP's job was to be an iconic piece of internet history, and they've entirely fulfilled their end of the bargain.
I actually purchased a $300 spot on this. I did get quite a few clicks, but very low-quality traffic. Mostly, I got lots of offers from copycat sites to join their "billion dollar" homepage or whatnot.<p>It's crazy how many copycats came out, very unoriginal thinking going on.
I think in many ways it is not a 'decaying digital artifact' as it is an excellent representation of the fallacy upon which a lot of the Internet hangs. In the Library of Alexandria you didn't have scrolls disappear because the kingdom where they originated had been crushed under the boot of an invader. But the Internet is no great library, no respository of knowledge, or an oasis of independent thought. The Internet is a conversation in a crowded room with amplified shotgun microphones pointed at all who walk through it.
I'm not sure why the article considers it "squandered": it did its job as long as the advertisers cared to maintain their links.<p>It hardly seems fair to blame a billboard being in disrepair if the company it advertised no longer exists.
I think all the broken links just goes to show that failure in business is the norm or that someone who thought it would be a good idea to promote their company on this service is probably not good at running business.
Would be interesting to know how many people on the million dollar homepage are on HN. I imagine there's a wonderful cross over between the two groups.<p>Even though its with a business we're not doing now, my business partner and I are on there.<p>Edit: don't think it deserves a downvote - is it not an interesting question? I bet there are loads of serial entrepreneurs on both
FWIW, I'm building <a href="https://PageDash.com" rel="nofollow">https://PageDash.com</a> as a private web archive to address the problem of link rot, beginning from a personal level. Launching in late August. Think of it as a private version of perma.cc.
I just heard about the "Million Dollar Homepage" for the first time last week. Would this idea (or one like it) work today? Making a million dollars for something so bizarre, fun, and straightforward sounds amazing. Can anyone reference other attempts at similar ideas?
A more modern variant, <a href="https://catbillboard.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow">https://catbillboard.wordpress.com/</a><p>"Million Dollar Cat Billboard project sells 10 000 “squares” (places on a billboard) $100 dollars each to make world’s first ever cat billboard and put it up in 10 cities around the globe for a month. To proudly show your cat to the world you need to buy at least one square. But of course you can buy as many of them as you wish as long as they are available."
As good a time as any to trot out my hobby horse
with suggestions on how to mitigate data rot.
Aimed at science, but more broadly applicable.<p>"Identifiers for the 21st century"
<a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001414" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001414</a><p>note/claimer/disclaimer:
Although I am included as an author I do not write that well.
It's amazing how well designed the ads within the image are...it's a big jumble but many of them stand out quite strongly with just a single word. I wonder if they designed ads with the surrounding color context taken into account.
My first web page ever is in there. I'm not sure how special of a thing that is I don't know how many icons are involved.<p>Also I wonder how Word got around to me about things like this in the days of MySpace and yahoo as my internet.
I wonder how he got everything to fit as more and more space was sold and if it was a manual process? It must have been like playing Tetris on expert mode.
Here's an archive of the article for those having trouble accessing it:
<a href="https://perma.cc/A6ZZ-79X6" rel="nofollow">https://perma.cc/A6ZZ-79X6</a>
Whatever happened to DOI? (Or leveraging Google's knowledge of redirects?) A lot of rot is hosting changes; the documents, if the author cared, could well be hosted somewhere else.
1780/2816 links being reachable is actually much higher than I'd expect over 12 years. I'm not sure if that's what I would have predicted from the outset.
Oh wow, I remember that.<p>1 million pixels for only a dollar each!<p>That guy made a nice bundle off the idea, it got picked up and hyped by the media so much I'm sure the companies that bought in got some ROI, or at least some publicity. Such was the extent of the dot com bubble that this sort of nonsense could happen and everyone cheered...
I wonder what the "rot factor" is for scientific citations? Some professional societies I am in mandate URLs for bibliographical references. Most of the time these are peer-reviewed articles. But they can be softer references like Wiki reviews, data repositories, etc.