# What is internet real estate?

> Internet real estate means buying a fixed spot on a shared web page. What owning a square legally means (nothing), practically means, and how Square Town does it.

Source: https://square.pov.town/glossary/internet-real-estate

**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](/glossary/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](/glossary/eviction) by someone paying double what you paid — the record is overwritten and the feed says so. And an icon nobody has [kissed](/glossary/kiss-the-icon) 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](/glossary/ring-unlock) as it fills, so early squares sit closer to the [Throne](/glossary/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 [/glossary/pixel-advertising](/glossary/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.