I was talking with an entrepreneur earlier today about about milliondollarhomepage and what a simple, brilliant concept it is. It’s one of those things that will really only work once (although I have some further thoughts on that below). 1000Tags is different enough from MillionDollarHomePage that I think it will have a lot of sucess, too. They call it “the first commercial tag cloud”. And that’s exactly what it it. You can purchase a tag, pay by the character and font size, and hope that a lot of traffic to your site is the result. They are selling up to 1,000 tags. Tags can be exclusive (click the Star Wars tag), but cost significantly more, and they will only sell 50 of them. The remaining tags link to a results page with what appears to be an unlimited number of results (click the Download Music tag). How much does it cost? The price goes like this (in US$): * For shared tags, the price is $5 per character, but with a minimum of $25 even if your tag is less than 5 characters, which is ok since most tags will use at least 5 characters. Also, since the maximum tag size is 20 characters, the maximum price for a shared tag is $100 * Exclusive tags cost $250 upfront just for making them “exclusive”. Then, the price goes up depending on the number of characters and font size. It can get expensive if you use up lots of characters and a very large font size. Remember, exclusive tags are expensive not because we’re greedy but because we’d rather people book shared tags. Like MDH, this site is a proof of concept that cannot be easily copied. Duplicate sites will clearly not have the ability to get the same level of attention. However, I do think already established websites could add a commercial tag cloud, or MDH-like banner area for logos, and generate (one time?) revenue from it. Perhaps 1000tags and MDH could even supply the APIs and service to do this. Is this an incredibly cool new web 2.0 business? No. But it is a smart idea that I wish I had thought of and executed on. Good for them. Thanks, Luis Salfro, for emailing me about this. → Read More