From the million dollar's web, to ‘seriespepito’ Is it a Bubble 2.0?

Abstract

In 2005, a 21 years old English student created The Million Dollar Homepage. The idea was simple: he divided the site into 100 blocks of 10x10 pixels each with the aim to sell these spaces to the brands interested in advertising on the website. Each pixel would cost 1 dollar. That apparently naive idea ended reaching notoriety in the newly named Web 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2005). Worldwide online media, many of whom just began their journey through the Web, covered the curious initiative. The online media coverage also jumped to traditional media (crossmedia narrative, Jenkins, 2006) and this issue had a direct influence on the increase of visitors and number of page views in the site. It was, in fact, one of the first examples of a viral message in the Web. Advertising brands were attracted by the media impact of the website, which became a showcase. Companies such as The Times or Yahoo were attracted by the web influence. In a few months, the business student Alex Tew sold every single pixel of his website to advertising brands, amountig to a million dollars. In 2015, according to Alexa Rank, onclickads.net, publited.com, adcash.com, popads.net or adf.ly are among the 150 most visited websites in Spain, competing with companies like facebook.com, wordpress.es, marca.com, rtve.es or bbva.es, to name a few. We present in the following article the reasons why these affiliate advertising networks occupy key positions in the rankings of most visited websites and to this end, we will focus on studying the business model of some of the main links pages, which offer access to download or online viewing of media formats, including series, documentaries and film content. We will focus in particular on the business models like seriespepito.com, closed due to alleged intellectual property crime in 2014. They generated within months, about a million dollars profit. We studied, with this purpose, the role of the affiliate networks, the use of tracking tools such as cookies and similar technologies and the role of the various parties involved in this process: advertisers, affiliation networks, publishers, receivers of the messages and potential consumers.