What is internet real estate?

The metaphor Alex Tew's Million Dollar Homepage made famous, and what it actually buys you.

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, one-time, and lasts forever* — until someone pays double to evict you.

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#

Buying a square inserts one row in Square Town's D1 (SQLite) database: your domain, x, y, the price you paid, 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.

Two asterisks. Any square can be evicted by someone paying double what you paid — the record is overwritten and the feed says so. And an icon nobody has kissed in 90 days fades to grayscale; still yours, just heartbroken. 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 buy 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?#

One-time payment, no expiry, no renewal. The record persists unless someone evicts you by paying double what you paid.

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.