How much does mmmzr make?

October 27th, 2006 • General

So here’s the next $1,000,000 site. But this time it follows a pyramid scheme. In short: you buy a spot in a column, you get your money back when the next person buys the spot above you, then get the same amount of money on the next person

I believe that Tadashi is either a big fan of chess, or just an evil genius. Think about it , if he makes it to only 20 rows, he’ll be making around $1,048,576 per column, or $7,340,032 for all columns.

But he’s not taking all that money to his own pocket, he’ll have to pay the people in lower rows. Let’s do the math. I’ll use 10 columns to simplify things:

Price	Refund	Reward	Profit
$1	-	-	-
$2	$1	-	$1
$4	$2	$1	$1
$8	$4	$2	$2
$16	$8	$4	$4
$32	$16	$8	$8
$64	$32	$16	$16
$128	$64	$32	$32
$256	$128	$64	$64
$512	$256	$128	$128
$1024	$512	$256	$256
		Total	$512

“Refund” is what Tadashi has to pay the previous owner of the spot, and “Reward” is what he has to pay to the person before that. He’s already reached the 11th row, so he’s made about $1024 * 7 = $7,168. Not bad at all.

Putting aside that he makes money in binary, did you notice a pattern there? Starting from $4, or his third customer, Tadashi’s profit is exactly 1/4th of the price of his ads. So unfortunately, after 20 rows, he’ll only be making $262,144 per column, instead of the aforementioned million. Still not such a bad profit.

I might be jumping to conclusions here, but these ads get a little pricey at 14th or 15th rows, I’m sure there will always be people willing to buy a spot like this for $32K, but the majority probably won’t.

The $1/px deal was sweet because people thought about it as “a bunch of pixels”. One of the largest real estates there is around 90x80px, which costs $7,200; still cheaper than the 10th sale on mmmzr.

Now excuse me, I’m having a “why didn’t I think of that” moment.

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