FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQ)

Welcome... here is where you'll find answers to the most frequently asked questions about the who, what, where, when and why of Million Dollar City Pages. If you have any questions that are not covered here in our FAQ, please use our contact page and we'll try to respond as soon as possible.

1. What is the idea behind Million Dollar City Pages?
2. By the way, who are you, and why are you doing this?
3. Is this for real... or are you guys just joking around?
4. How did you come up with this idea?
5. What makes your pixels worth buying, and how long will it be online?
6. What should I use for my website pixels, title and description?
7. How do I select which city, and pixel block number to use?
8. What is the City Search Engine, and how do I choose my keywords?
9. Do you have a way I can show your pixel count on my blog or website?

1. What is the idea behind Million Dollar City Pages? [Top]
1. Actually there are two ideas we had. The first was to try and find a way to monetarily help the victims of Hurricane Katrina and Rita, who are being hit every day with disappearing federal funds and diminishing donations. Why do we care? Well, our family went through Hurricane Rita in Houston, and it was scary to say the least. Although we were lucky and got through relatively unscathed, after the hurricane, we saw over 100 families living on cots at our local volunteer fire department with everything they owned on those cots. It made our hearts scream to try to find a way to help these people, and that's what inspired us to do this. The second idea, suggested later by Chris and Drew, is to make enough money to pay for their college in the next few years. They want to be able to go to college without incurring a huge college debt that could potentially take decades to pay off.
2. By the way, who are you, and why are you doing this? [Top]
1. Our names are Chris, Drew, Joanne and Tom Straub. We live in Katy, which is a little town just west of Houston, Texas. Initially, our family wanted to do something as a team to be able to help the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But as we've progressed, the reasons why we continue to build Million Dollar City Pages have become more apparent. For our advertisers, we want to provide a spam-free and click-fraud-free advertising service. For our visitors, we want to provide a convenient, fast and trustable way to find what they are looking for. For our sponsoring charities, we want to provide them with both recognition, and the funds they need to help victims of natural and man-made disasters. Although it might take awhile for our site to "catch on", in the end we believe that people will understand what we're doing and work with us to make this a win-win-win reality for everyone. Overall, despite everything else that's going on in the world right now, we believe that people are basically good inside, and will want to help.
3. Is this for real... or are you guys just joking around? [Top]
1. Oh yes! This is absolutely for real! While we may have some fun on the site at times, this is no joking matter. Everyone is invited to buy pixels in their city to promote their business, knowing that a good chunk of every dollar is going to go to Charities to help others survive natural and man-made disasters. The pixel blocks you buy will be displayed on our City Pages permanently, and your site will have an exclusive text ad listing in our City Search Engine. We believe you can't beat the price for the exposure your site will get. In the long run, we believe your pixel ad and text ad listing will give you the best possible advertising value available.
4. How did you come up with this idea? [Top]
1. When Joanne and I (Tom) were focused on coming up with ideas on helping victims of Hurricane Katrina and Rita here locally, we thought about trying something on the Internet. The most obvious idea was to create some kind of e-commerce site that could make money by selling items where we could then divert some of the funds as donations to charities. When trying to find the best selling product, it occurred to us that it was the major search engines that were making the most money on the Internet. Looking closer into this idea, we thought of selling text ads like everyone else using a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy. But while doing our investigation, it showed us that the major search engines were being battered with complaints about being irrelevant due to spam listings in their results, as well as being served lawsuits arising from allegations of pay-per-click fraud. We thought there had to be a better way if we were going to try this concept.
   
   Our first breakthrough was to get away from the pay-per-click model, and make the decision to use just a simple upfront price with no recurring fees. Then, we had to decide if we wanted to offer ads with a limited time period, or permanent ads. We decided to go with permanent ads since we felt the more listings we had, the more our visitors could find exactly what they are looking for. The real bonus for us was that this would also eliminate any possibility of pay-per-click fraud.
   
   The next significant event was when Chris and Drew called attention to an article in Reuters about Alex Tew in the UK, who made over a million dollars for himself in just a few months by selling pixels on his Million Dollar Homepage. That gave us the idea for offering graphical pixel ads as well. This allowed us to offer our advertisers two ads for the price of one... a graphical pixel ad in addition to a text ad listing. This event also gave us the solution as to how to charge for our ads. By size... just like all the off-line newspapers and magazines do. But this also meant we would now have to manually review both the text and images for each submission as well. At first, we thought the extra work might not be worth it. But we changed our minds as soon as we realized that manual review helped us by eliminating spam from getting into our search engine listings in the first place.
   
   Finally, one last thing that struck us was that since Alex's pixels sold so fast, many people got locked out from buying any pixels simply because they didn't find out about it in time. This didn't seem to erode demand for them, as his last 1000 pixels sold out for over $38,000 USD on eBay within just six months after the launch of his site. We realized we couldn't just clone Alex Tew's homepage idea, and we thought that since our country (the USA) is so much bigger than Alex's country (the UK), we could expect even more demand than he experienced. So, why not create a local City Page pixel map for each major city in the US? After all, every city needs charitable donations... certainly not just Houston or New Orleans! By getting a charity to sponsor a city, then all donation funds generated by sales on that City Page would be paid to that one sponsoring charity. This would allow us to accurately account for the total donations generated for each city, and to know where the funds were being distributed.
   
   When all this started, we really didn't have any idea if this would be successful or not. But in the end, we decided that it was certainly worth a try... and either way... it would be fun!
5. What makes your pixels worth buying, and how long will it be online? [Top]
1. Your graphical pixel ad will be seen on our City Page maps by potentially millions of people for many years to come. In addition to your pixels, you'll also get an exclusive text ad listing in our City Search Engine where people can find your site using keywords and keyphrases that you supply. It may be worth noting that your text ad listing will be totally free of click-fraud, and your listing won't get lost in an avalanche of spam site listings, like in the major search engines. To give you an idea how long we intend to be online, we have registered both of our domains (milliondollarcitypages.com & million-dollar-city-pages.com) each for a full five years. Although our intention is to keep your pixels permanently displayed on our site for at least five years, please understand we cannot guarantee that your pixels will be displayed on our site nor that our site will be online for any specific amount of time.
6. What should I use for my website pixels, title and description? [Top]
1. Anything you want, of course! Seriously... what you might do is try to fit all or part of your business logo into your pixels for brand recognition. Your title can be 60 characters long, and will be displayed when people move their mouse over your pixels, and your title also acts as the anchor text of the link in your City Search Engine text ad listing. We recommend you use a title that gets people curious about your website. Your description can be up to 255 characters in length, and we suggest that it describe what your site has to offer to your customers. It's probably best to focus on the benefits you offer to your customers rather than any features of your products.
7. How do I select which city, and pixel block number to use? [Top]
1. You are certainly welcome to choose any city to advertise in. Even more than one! We suggest picking the city (or cities) your customers are most likely to live in. To find a pixel block number, first click on the city you are interested in on our home page, and then hover your mouse over the pixel map on that City Page. If a pixel block is available, it will show a popup tooltip saying "Pixel Block 887 is available" or similar. If you are buying a single pixel block, then that is the pixel block number you should use when ordering. However, if your image is bigger than 10x10 pixels, then the pixel block number you should pick will be for the top-left corner of your image. Javascript must be enabled in your browser for the popup tooltip to work properly.
8. What is the City Search Engine, and how do I choose my keywords? [Top]
1. The City Search Engine is unique to Million Dollar City Pages, and contains exclusive listings for those who buy pixels. Search our listings by entering keywords into the search box on our City Search Engine page. The keywords your customers can enter can be a single word, or phrase of up to 5 words in length. You get to choose which three keyphrases you expect your customers to use to find your website in our City Search Engine when you order your pixels. We suggest using one to five-word keyphrases that your customers would commonly use when searching for your business or website when using the major search engines on the web.
9. Do you have a way I can show your pixel count on my blog or website? [Top]
1. Absolutely! We have both a small image for your blogroll, and a larger image you can use on your website. The actual code and images are shown below.
   
   To use the small image below, copy & paste the following HTML code:
   
   <a href="http://www.milliondollarcitypages.com/" title="Million Dollar City Pages"><img src="http://www.milliondollarcitypages.com/pixelsbought.gif" alt="Million Dollar City Pages Pixels Sold"></a>
   
   To use the large image below, copy & paste the following HTML code:
   
   <a href="http://www.milliondollarcitypages.com/" title="Million Dollar City Pages"><img src="http://www.milliondollarcitypages.com/pixelcount.gif" alt="Million Dollar City Pages Pixels Sold"></a>
   
   Both images will be updated with new counts any time pixels are added.