The million dollar home page was conceived back in 2005 by a student in Wiltshire, England as a way to pay for his education. The idea was, create a single web page, 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, then sell each pixel on the page for $1 each. The hope was, the page would go viral and bring value to the advertising embedded in the page.

As it turns out, the page sold out quickly, and the page did go viral. Every pixel on the page has an embedded link. The folks at Quartz (follow the headline link) revisited the page.

Eight years later, the site still exists, essentially frozen in time. That provides an interesting window into the phenomenon of “link rot,” or hyperlinks that used to work but now point to dead pages. Our analysis found that 22% of the Million Dollar Homepage’s pixels now fail to load a webpage when clicked.

Interesting social experiment, and an interesting read.