Interview with Needacharity.

First of please introduce yourself and your site to our readers?

My name is Joe Nagle and I live in Nottingham, England. I have created the NeedaCharity.com site to allow charitable donations to made quickly.

Most people have been inspired by the Million Dollar Homepage, where did you get your inspiration from?

The million dollar home page was my inspiration as well. I saw an article on news website and thought it was genius. I probably took more notice as Alex Tew was studying in my home town. A few days later I saw an interview on the chat show Richard and Judy, and wondered if I could do a similar thing with a different slant.

What software do you use to run your pixel page and why did you choose it?

I wanted to get the site up and running as soon as possible so I used the only software I had access too, MS Frontpage 2003.

What makes your site different or special, what angle have you taken for your Pixel page?

In November last year I promised myself to donate some money to charity after watching the fundraiser, Children In Need. The million dollar home page inspired me to give indirectly by setting up the site. I was going to setup a site that mirrored the traditional sites with all the money going to charity, but there are implications for doing that and there were already multiple pixel sites drawing traffic. I couldn't see an easy way to convince potential advertisers to come to me instead of the other sites!.

The original pixel page generated traffic mainly through viral marketing mainly spawned by media interest, how do you generate traffic to your site?

As well as contacting advertisers directly, I am using Google adwords to promote my site and will attempt to get the site appearing in other search engine lists without using false optimisation techniques. I hope to get some advertising through the company I work for and some other future ventures.

What do you offer potential advertisers, how much do you charge and how much traffic do you envisage an advertiser could generate by advertising with you?

I offer advertisers totally free advertising via the image which links directly to their donation page. It is very difficult to estimate the hit rate for potential advertisers as I do not have any stats on the online donation market, but my hope is to give the advertising charities the edge in drawing that revenue.

Currently the top 5 Alexa ranked pixel sites enjoy a lot of interest from the public. How long do you think this will last, is there a long term future for pixel pages?

A pixel page in itself does not really offer anything to the potential purchaser so the long term future looks bleak, however if a site is innovative and can offer other services, it will draw traffic in and the advertiser will get his dollars worth. I would class the MDHP as a milestone in the life of the Internet so I think that site will always draw traffic to some degree if it stays around. There are probably uses for pixel pages that no one has thought of yet, these may not necessarily be revenue earning but be educational or aid accessibility. Long term pixel blocks of advertising may become more prominent as they allow efficient use of screen space while remaining in the context of the site.

Besides your own pixel page, which other pixel page do you secretly admire and why?

The MDHP just for the idea but probably more so for getting it filled so rapidly and raising the vast amount of publicity. I also like the image shape of the WebInaPint site

Thanks for your time in answering these questions. Before you go are there any comments you want to impart to our pixel hungry readership?

Keep thinking, keep giving.