Press

The rules, in full. The price only goes up. You are not bidding, and you are not paid when the next person takes it, so there is no resale and no refund. What you keep is an owner number that is never reused, a certificate, and a permanent clickable row in the ownership history. Everything else is temporary on purpose.

The shortest reign so far is 59 seconds. Somebody paid, appeared on the homepage, and was replaced before they had finished telling anyone. They still have their certificate.

The best result so far is 1,318 clicks to one owner. Links keep collecting clicks after they leave the homepage, because the history stays clickable, so the number is still going up for people who stopped owning it weeks ago.

The most common misunderstanding. People see the current value sitting directly above the next price and assume the gap is profit, then conclude the upside is a dollar. It is not a dollar, it is nothing: no money ever goes back to a previous owner. Working that out is usually the moment somebody either buys it or writes it off.

The site admits it might be lying. Until the price passes $1,000 the masthead carries an asterisk and the footnote reads "Currently, probably not the most expensive link on the internet." It removes itself automatically.

Registered charities go on for free. A bicycle charity that delivers bikes to orphanages has held it. See charities.

It is built to look like 1994 on purpose. The typefaces are Apple's actual System 6 bitmap fonts, subset and self-hosted. The pointing hand next to the link is the hand from Cairo, the old Macintosh dingbat font, redrawn pixel by pixel as a grid of rectangles because Cairo itself cannot be redistributed. Font smoothing is switched off so the pixels stay hard, and every page is pure ASCII, because these fonts have no curly quote or em dash to render.

Not everything submitted is welcome. Every URL is vetted before a payment is taken, and pornography, phishing and malware, stolen or counterfeit goods, the usual crypto-scam patterns and hate material are all refused outright. So are internal and private addresses, so the link cannot be pointed at somebody's infrastructure. Anything that gets past the automatic check can still be taken down by hand, and when it is, the buyer is refunded automatically and the previous owner goes back on the homepage. Three have been removed that way so far.

People do try it on. On the second day the contact form took eight code injection attempts inside two seconds. None of them did anything, because the database queries are parameterised and there is no template engine or shell for them to reach, but the fact that all eight landed unimpeded is why the form has a rate limit now. Referrer spam bots forge their address into the traffic logs hoping somebody clicks through to find out what they are. It is a website that publishes a hyperlink for money, so it was always going to attract people testing the edges.

Writing something? Get in touch and ask anything. Happy to talk about how it works, what it has cost, what it has made, or which bits have gone badly. The ownership history is public and complete, so the numbers can be checked without taking anyone's word for it.