The Million Dollar Homepage, created in 2005 by Alex Tew, allowed advertisers to purchase space on a 1000 by 1000 pixel grid at the price of one dollar per pixel. Hyperlinks to the associated site were embedded in the advert, allowing visitors to interact with it. The result, at the auctioning off of the last pixels in early 2006, was a sickeningly colorful snapshot of the early Internet, where at once advertisers competed for space and collaborated to fill it up.
We tend to attach a sense of permanence to the Internet, cautioning that once something is there it never goes away. The oldest of these adverts is 16 years old, and yet very few link to the original site they advertise. One day, none of them will represent what is shown to us here, and link rot will cause the rest to stop working entirely. An image such as this only holds the truth about the moment it is captured, but cutting out the advertisements to since-lost sites reveals a much more striking portrait. Vast swaths of black infect and overtake, the implication that in some unknown future it will blanket the last few pixels in permanent shadow. The Internet decays as quickly as it grows.
GIF of approximately 800 frames, intended to be played on loop indefinitely.