Can 8 million pixels save the world?
As always, the answer to that question is NO.
But they can make a difference. Let’s see how.
Do you remember the webpage above?
The year was 2005. Alex Tew, a 21 year old guy from Wiltshire, England decides that he needs some money to pay for college and creates a webpage to finance his degree.
That page ended up becoming part of the history of the internet.
The Million Dollar Homepage was a very simple concept, just a 1000 x 1000 pixel grid where each pixel was sold for $1. It went viral and he sold every last one of those pixels.
This stunt ended up making young Alex more than $1 million .
Could a similar concept change people’s lives?
It can. And it will.
Today, we’re launching 8M Pixels.
It’s a variation of that idea with a couple of important changes.
- First of all, it’s the first 4K webpage ever. Really. More than 8 freakin’ million pixels.
- Second, we won’t keep any money to ourselves. At all. Zero. Nada. Even better, we’re not even touching any money. We’ll explain how it works in a minute.
- Third, not all pixels cost the same. We decided to split the 8 million pixels in 4 batches. The first 2M will cost 1 cent each, the second batch 10 cents each, the third 1 euro each and the final batch 10 euros each.
This means that, on the first batch, a 10x10 logo costs only 1 euro.
This is how it works:
- Go to www.8Mpixels.com.
- Upload your logo and place it on the page.
- Add your email and the url you want your logo to link to.
- We’ll tell you how many pixels you’re using and the corresponding “cost”.
- Donate that amount to one of the selected charities (list and rationale below).
- Send us the receipt for the donation.
- Your logo is now live.
This is how it WILL work. For now, staying true to the Lean philosophy, it’s completely manual. Send us an email to admin@8mpixels.com and we’ll take it from there.
When all pixels are “sold”, the total amount generated will be around 22,220,000 Euros.
Yes, more than 22 million euros.
It sounds crazy. We believe it’s not.
Some might think “That’s way too much money”. No, it isn’t. Even if we were to focus only on the refugee crisis, 22 millions would be a drop in the ocean. The International Organization for Migration estimates that over a 1 million refugees have arrived in Europe this year. If we divided those 22 million by 1 million, we would get 22 euros per refugee.
Does that sound like much to you?
Why so few organizations?
We limited the organizations you can donate to for practical reasons. We have other jobs and this being a side project that we won’t make any money off, means that we can’t afford to work on it full-time. And because we need to manually validate the receipts we get, we decided to restrict the organizations to five.
We used GiveWell’s ranking to select the first 4 organizations and, since we couldn’t ignore the plight of the refugees (Katharine Viner recently called it “the crisis of our times”), we added a fifth one, who’s work and transparency is also lauded by GiveWell:
Who is this for?
To you.
We know you care, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.
You can link to your blog, Facebook page, Twitter account or Instagram profile. If you’re looking for a job, why not link it to your LinkedIn?
If you don’t have any of these, you can offer the traffic to someone whose work you follow or admire. Link the image to your favorite blog, to your friend’s portfolio on Behance or to a cool project you think needs exposure.
It’s up to you to decide.
The only sure thing is that, no matter how many clicks you get on the image, you know your money will have an impact in the world. A very positive impact.
Agencies and brands are welcome too.
John Wanamaker once said:
On 8Mpixels.com, you can be sure that no money is wasted.
How 8Mpixels.com was born.
Kwamecorp does some very cool hackathons and, in the latest one, impossible joined them. Inspired by the amazing projects that are coming out of the Techfugees’s Hackathons (congrats to Mike Butcher and rest of the team and to all the participants from around the world!) our team decided to take a shot at finding a way to contribute.
But how?
Two days before we had the hackathon, Allen Stone submited the Million Dollar Map to Product Hunt. That reminded us of the original page and got us wondering: Is there a way to revive this concept aiming for the greater good? We decided to connect these ideas and use the hackathon to promote giving to some great causes, including helping refugees.
More than 10 years have passed since the original page went live. In 2005, the average browser resolution was 1024x768, Facebook was just getting started, and only 15% of the world population had internet access. Today, we have 4k laptops (we even have 4K smartphones), Facebook has more than 1,500 million users, almost half of the world population has internet access. A lot changed since.
But some things haven’t. We still have huge global problems that need to be addressed. People forcibly displaced as a result of conflict and persecution, malaria and parasite infections in developing countries or extreme poverty. These are just a few of them. In some cases, a couple of euros really do make a difference.
On 8Mpixels you can be sure that 100% of the money you spent will make a difference.
Every pixel counts.
P.S. If you think this is a cool project, don’t forget to recommend this post and/or share it. Let’s make it viral.
8Mpixels.com was made with love by Henrique Aparício, Hugo Alves, Jonathan Tavares and Sara Ribas and with support from Kwamecorp and impossible. (Update: Sofia Mesquita just joined the team to manage our Social Media efforts. Welcome, Sofia.)
