Dearest readers, I present to you the Million Dollar Homepage!
I was glad to come across this blast from the past courtesy of a friend of mine who was researching this for a school project (a university course on futurism). You can easily Google the site as it (or a copy of it is still up) and I think you might be amazed and puzzled at the same time just as I was. According to Wikipedia,
"The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels."
Dearest readers, this one page site made a million dollars, spawned an army of copycats, and was considered a genius idea. People thought this was the future of online advertising and it generated tremendous hype at the time. Living in 2021, looking at it in hindsight, people were nowhere near close when they thought this approach was going to be a long term trend. There were so many businesses that spent a dollar and never even got a return on such a small amount of money. Now, imagine if a company offered to design homepages like these and get investor money in tune of millions of dollars? You would not want to be an investor in something like that unless you absolutely have money to work.
In fact, looking back at it, there were many corporate attempts to do online advertising, and now we have Google and Facebook (and the likes of Clickbank but that is a whole different story). We have promoted listings on online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay. All of these had to beat competition and keep evolving to become as powerful as they are today. Facebook had privacy concerns surrounding it and other scandals as well around the time it went public... yet whoever bought the stock then has not looked back. What I am trying to say is how do you know that this blockchain technology is not something like blockchain 1.0 and then it drops off until we are ready for it? Virtual reality is something companies tried to get to catch on multiple times and failed, even though it is definitely a great idea. Voice recognition was never accurate enough until companies created Siri Alexa etc. that are constantly learning how people of all different dialects speak English. Looking at electric vehicles, there were many of them in USA in proportion to gasoline vehicles and charging stations were spread all over major cities (Google lost history of electric cars).
So, what should we do? Ultimately, I think the solution is offered by short term traders, especially those who day trade or swing trade full-time for a living. Whichever strategy a trader uses, they have a clear set of rules for entering and exiting a trade. Replace the word trade with the word investment and there you go, you have yourself some wonderful advice. Have a clear exit strategy in mind and stick with it. Otherwise, you may end up holding the bag one too many times and no longer wish to try investing at all, which would be really bad because, well, you cannot win if you do not participate.