Internet real estate is the metaphor, popular since The Million Dollar Homepage (2005), for buying a fixed spot on a shared web page — pixels, tiles or squares — and calling it yours. Legally it is nothing: no registry, no title, no property right. Practically it is a row in a database that says your URL sits at a given coordinate. On Square Town (square.pov.town) that row costs $1 to claim and lasts forever* — until someone pays to evict you ($2 for a $1 square, double the last price after that).
TL;DR: you don't own land, you own a record. What matters is who keeps the record, for how long, and whether anyone can overwrite it.
How it works on Square Town
Claiming a square inserts one row in Square Town's D1 (SQLite) database: your domain, x, y, the price you paid ($0 for a claim), and a secret deed token. The deed URL is the only proof of ownership — there are no accounts and no login. "Forever" means no expiry and no subscription; the wall runs on Cloudflare's free tier, so there is no hosting bill that can lapse and take the record with it. The whole ledger is public: GET https://square.pov.town/api/state returns every listing with domain, coordinates, clicks, views and kisses.
One asterisk. Any square can be evicted by someone paying double what you paid, $1 minimum — the record is overwritten and the feed says so. Location is the game: the live area starts at the central 16×16 and grows outward as it fills, so early squares sit closer to the Throne.
Where else it appears
The Million Dollar Homepage sold 1,000,000 pixels at $1 each in 10×10 blocks and made $1.04M in five months; today roughly 40 % of its links are dead, which is the honest end state of most internet real estate — the record outlives the tenant. 2026 brought a wave of $1-square walls (Million Squares Project, Link for a Dollar, The Forever Wall, Own the Void with a 1,000,000 × 1,000,000 grid, so no scarcity at all). NFT variants such as Million Dollar Token Page move the record onto a blockchain; it is still a record. See What is pixel advertising? for the genre's history.
Example
You claim the square at (497, 503) for $1 and bookmark the deed. Six months later someone pays $2 and evicts you: your row is marked evicted, theirs is now the record for (497, 503), and the next evictor must pay $4. Nothing was "owned" in a legal sense at any point — but for six months, every visitor who clicked that cell landed on your site, and your deed still shows how many did.
FAQ
Do I legally own my square?
No. You own a database record and a deed URL that proves it is yours. No site in this genre offers anything more, whether the record is in SQLite or on a blockchain.
What does "forever" mean on Square Town?
No expiry, no renewal, and nothing to pay after the $1 claim. The record persists unless someone evicts you by paying double what you paid ($1 minimum).
Can Square Town go away?
Any site can. Square Town runs on Cloudflare's free tier, which is the point: there is no monthly bill whose non-payment would delete the wall.
Is internet real estate an investment?
Treat it as visibility and fun, not an asset. Square Town has no resale market; the only "appreciation" is that evicting you costs the next person double what you paid.