Advertising is definitely a medium that gains strength in numbers. Individually, advertisments are mildly offensive but put a whole lot of them in one place and make them glow however, and the whole slowly gains ground over the sum of the parts. A single ad on the side of a bus stop gives me the shits, but an intersection full of neon gets me all kinds of randy. Shibuya, Ginza, Times Square, Picadilly Circus have all had a bite of my cherry. Advertising at this scale and saturation becomes a kind of spectacular conglomerate.

It has become its own entity; an attraction in its own right. Who cares what its selling?

Online, advertising is as much a scourge as it is in the meatspace - generally crass, insubstantial and intrusive. Banner ads, popup ads, google ads, whatever. Occasionally it can be polite and demure, but this is rare. Sites like Boing Boing approach a kind of saturation close to, say, Times Square, but as others have noted elsewhere, it is more Nascar than New York City. The attractation here is still the content, not the spectacle of brand awareness.

With the launch of The Million Dollar Homepage, the internet has its first neon intersection. It is advertising for the sake of advertising; there is no reason to stop by other than to bask in the glow of its vulgar pixels.

Set up by UK student Alex Tew as a means to fund hisUniversity tuition the page is ingenious in its simplicity. There a million pixels for sale for a dollar each. And the audacity has paid off - he has already sold over half the pixels.

I like this form of online advertising; saturated, singular and meaningless.