Every pixel wall rots because it sells permanent space to websites that are not permanent. Sites die, domains lapse, nobody prunes, and after a few years a good share of the wall links to nothing. Square Town (square.pov.town) is a free-to-claim favicon wall that treats rot as a game mechanic instead of a fact of life: anyone can kiss any icon for free (kisses are public and counted, so attention is visible), any square can be evicted for double its price ($1 minimum), and sites without a working favicon are put in a public Hall of Clowns.
TL;DR — The Million Dollar Homepage, sold out in 2005, has roughly 40 % dead links as of August 2026. Almost every clone has the same problem and does nothing about it; a few expire pixels on a timer instead. Square Town doesn't delete anything. Free public kisses make attention visible (counted, and each one grows the icon's tower), evictions let anyone recycle a spot for 2× its price, $1 minimum, and broken favicons are surfaced as clowns until they're fixed. The wall stays legible without a moderator.
Roughly 40 % of the original pixel wall now points nowhere
The Million Dollar Homepage sold a million pixels at $1 each in 10×10 blocks and sold out in five months in 2005 for $1.04M. It has been frozen ever since. As of August 2026 it's a sold-out archive where roughly 40 % of the links are dead — the buyers' sites folded, moved, or let their domains lapse, and the wall has no way to notice.
That's not a knock on the original; it was a one-off stunt and it finished. But it is what happens to every wall that sells "forever" and then stops touching the data. Twenty-one years is long enough for most small websites to die at least once. Full autopsy: the Million Dollar Homepage 21 years later.
Why walls rot: sites die and nobody prunes
Three things happen to a link on a wall, in this order:
- The site changes. It moves to a new domain, gets acquired, redirects to a parking page. The link still resolves, so it looks fine, but it isn't what the buyer paid to show.
- The site dies. DNS goes, TLS expires, the host returns 404 or nothing. The block in town is now a picture of a company that no longer exists.
- Nobody prunes. The wall operator has no incentive to remove a paid block (the money's already in), no signal that it's dead (nobody's checking), and often no operator at all any more. In our August 2026 survey of 434 pixel walls and logo boards, 160 are dead outright — the wall itself is the dead link.
Uploaded images make it worse. A pixel block is a static PNG the buyer sent in once. It can't go stale on its own, so it keeps advertising a dead thing with perfect confidence. A favicon, by contrast, is fetched live from the site; when the site goes, the icon goes with it. That's one of the reasons favicons beat pixels.
What other walls do about it: mostly nothing, occasionally a timer
| Approach | Who does it (as of Aug 2026) | What it means for the wall |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing — sell it once, keep it forever | The Million Dollar Homepage, The Forever Wall, Link for a Dollar, Million Squares Project, most clones | Rots at the rate the web rots; dead blocks stay until the wall itself dies |
| Expire pixels on a clock | 9Mpixels (2024, now dead): free pixels expired after 24 h unless paid for | Keeps the wall moving but punishes everyone equally, live or dead |
| Rent for a fixed term | Pixel Spotlight: £500 per block for 12 months, blocks expire after a year | Clean, but it's advertising rental, not ownership |
| Edit window then freeze | New Million Dollar Homepage: editable for 5 years, then locked for 20 | Postpones the rot; doesn't stop it |
| Signal-based pruning | Square Town: free public kisses (counted, grow the tower), evict for double, clowns for broken icons | Attention is visible, contested spots get recycled; live things stay for free |
Source for the competitor rows: our pixel wall graveyard survey, August 2026. The pattern is clear enough. Timers and rentals fix rot by making nothing permanent. Doing nothing keeps "forever" but lets the wall die from the inside. Square Town tries to keep squares free, with no renewal, and still have a pruning mechanism — three of them, in fact.
Answer one: kisses make attention visible (nothing is deleted)
Every icon on Square Town has a public kiss count. Anyone — owner, stranger, rival — can click any icon and press 💋. It's free, public, and counted (there's a "Kiss of the World" leaderboard), and each kiss adds a storey to the icon's 3D tower.
That is the entire mechanism (the whole rulebook is on how it works). The square stays owned. The link keeps working. The deed stays valid. Nothing is deleted and nobody has to appeal to a moderator.
Why this works against rot: a site that people still visit tends to get kissed, because its owner cares, its users find it, or a passer-by clicks 💋 out of respect (or pity). A site nobody's touched in months sits at a low kiss count with a stumpy tower while loved squares stand tall — which is exactly the signal a wall of links needs: attention, made visible. The design history of the mechanic — including a 90-day grayscale fade for unkissed icons, currently switched off — is in kiss the icon: decay explained and the glossary entry.
Answer two: evictions recycle valuable spots
The second mechanism is money. Any square on Square Town can be taken by paying double what its current owner paid. There's a $1 minimum, so a free square costs $1 to evict; the next evictor pays $2; then $4, $8. The evicted site is announced in the live feed ("💀 x evicted y for $1") and disappears from town; the evictor gets the exact cell.
For rot, this means the desirable spots can't stay dead. If a square next to the Throne is owned by a site that folded in 2027, someone will pay $1 for it. The wall prunes itself where pruning matters most: the centre, which everybody sees first. Cheap, unloved corners may sit untouched for a long time, which is fine — nobody's looking there anyway, and $1 buys them back the moment someone does. See the economics of eviction for how the doubling plays out.
Evictions also mean "forever" on Square Town is honest: it's forever*, unless someone pays double (or the $1 minimum). That asterisk is the price of a wall that doesn't rot.
Answer three: the Hall of Clowns surfaces broken favicons
The third mechanism catches the sites that never had it together. When a square is claimed, Square Town asks Google's favicon service for the domain's icon. If the service answers 404 — no favicon at all — the square shows a 🤡 instead of an icon and the domain is listed in the public Hall of Clowns in the side panel. There's a public recheck ("I fixed my favicon"), and escaping the Hall is announced in the feed too.
The same detector runs on every recheck, and rechecks are public (POST /api/recheck/:id, no key, no throttle — it's in the API docs). So a domain that loses its icon later — because the site went away and the favicon service eventually stopped returning one — can be flipped to a clown by anyone who bothers to ask. A clown is a visible flag in town that something's wrong with that site. Nothing is removed. The owner can fix the favicon and recheck; a rival can pay $1 (or double, if it's been fought over) and take the spot; or it can sit there in a red nose, which is a kind of public service. More on the mechanism at What is the Hall of Clowns?.
What this doesn't fix
Honesty section. Square Town's mechanics don't check whether your page is alive. A domain that redirects to a parking page but still serves a favicon looks healthy in town. A dead site with an enthusiastic ex-founder who keeps kissing it looks loved (that's allowed; kissing is a signal that someone cares, and someone does). And Square Town's own clicks go through /go/:id, a plain 302 redirect — no link equity, no crawler magic, so a dead link on Square Town is only a dead link, not an SEO problem for anyone.
What the three mechanisms buy is a wall that converges on being alive: neglect shows, valuable dead spots get evicted, and broken things get labelled, all without an operator pressing delete. That's the difference between a monument and a place — and it's the reason Square Town launched with three pruning rules instead of a moderator.
FAQ
How many of the Million Dollar Homepage's links are dead?
Roughly 40 % as of August 2026, per our landscape survey of 434 pixel walls. It sold out in 2005 and has been a frozen archive since; the wall has no mechanism to notice a dead link.
Does Square Town delete squares whose sites have died?
No. Nothing is deleted. Kiss counts show which squares people still care about; anyone can evict any square by paying double what it last went for, $1 minimum; and domains without a working favicon show a clown until fixed.
What does kissing an icon actually do?
It increments the icon's public kiss count and adds a storey to its 3D tower. Anyone can kiss any icon for free by clicking it and pressing 💋, and the most kissed icons rank on the "Kiss of the World" board.
Can I kiss my own square?
Yes. Owners can kiss their own icons, and so can anyone else. Kisses are public and counted, so a kissed square is visibly a square someone still cares about.
Do other pixel walls expire pixels?
Some do. As of August 2026, 9Mpixels (now dead) expired free pixels after 24 hours unless paid for; Pixel Spotlight rents blocks for 12 months; New Million Dollar Homepage allows edits for 5 years then locks for 20. Most walls, including the original, do nothing.