Life and style Shortcuts Would you pay $1 to find out how many other people have paid $1? A new website shows curiosity pays Johan McCubbin’s site is the latest in a line of ridiculous but lucrative internet stunts, from the Million Dollar Homepage to the I Am Rich app A fool and his $1 are easily parted on the internet. Photograph: Flashpop/Getty Images 
 
 Johan McCubbin has an offer for you: pay him $1 and he will tell you how many other people have paid him $1 to find out how many people have paid him $1. 
 
 It is a stupid idea. It shouldn’t work. Who would pay? Yet, by the time his website crashed on Thursday night under the weight of interest, and PayPal limited his account due to “suspicious activity”, he had earned … well, that would be telling. But it is more money than anyone would have reasonably expected. 
 
 It is the latest in a long line of ridiculous stunts that have found fortune on the internet. Perhaps the original sin is the Million Dollar Homepage, set up in 2005 by British student Alex Tew. The site offered permanent advertising space to anyone willing to pay $1 a pixel for a spot on a 1,000 x 1,000 grid. The idea was that the novelty of the site would drive traffic, which would drive advertising, which would increase the novelty, and so on. On 11 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels sold for a boosted price of $38,100. 
 
 Then there was I Am Rich, an app launched in the early days of the iPhone: it cost $999 and did nothing – other than earn its developer $8,000 in sales. 
 
 That was followed by the simple stupidity of Ship Your Enemies Glitter, which launched in 2015 as a stunt site, but was rapidly overwhelmed by real orders. 
 
 There is still room on the internet, it seems, for a relatively stupid idea to take off. McCubbin says he drew inspiration from the Million Dollar Homepage. 
 
 “I know there are loads of simple ideas that can make a man rich, all with just a bit of programming knowledge,” he says. “I like creating things (and also like cash). I’ve had offers to sell it to people from all around the world, but it’s my baby!” ||||| To pry money out of people online, you don't necessarily need to craft an emotional Kickstarter campaign or plead for them to donate to your Patreon. Sometimes, all you need to shake down a decent number of folks is a well-placed curiosity gap. 
 
 "How Many People Paid A Dollar To See How Many People Paid A Dollar?," a website created this spring by software developer Johan McCubbin, is very good at taking money using nothing but the aforementioned question and a PayPal link. That's all it is: You give your dollar, and in return, you find out how many other schmucks also forked over a buck. 
 
 "There's so many stupidly simple ideas out there that could potentially be lucrative," McCubbin told me in an email. He was inspired by the "Million Dollar Homepage" from 2005, which sold space for one dollar per pixel. "I find the concept of 'selling nothing for something' really interesting." 
 
 He said he was hoping to just break even on the domain name and hosting fees, but the results have been much better than he expected. 
 
 "Sometimes it's quiet with no payments for a week or so, and then it gets shared somewhere on social media and goes boom!" Occasionally, someone will write to him and ask for a refund, which he'll give if there was a processing error or some similar glitch. "Otherwise, you get what you paid for and you paid for what was advertised," he said. 
 
 Trying this myself, I encountered an odd loop—for every dollar I gave, it asked for another. I gave this website three of my own hard-earned dollars before asking McCubbin, "Am I doing something wrong, or am I part of the experiment?" He tells me it's not meant to loop, and when another Motherboarder tested it, it worked as promised, revealing the number of people who'd given a dollar. I won't tell you the number so as not to spoil the experience, but it is more than anyone has any right to make off of a website running one line of text and a PayPal link. 
 
 I'll never get those three dollars, or my dignity, back again.
– “I know there are loads of simple ideas that can make a man rich," Johan McCubbin tells the Guardian. That's true, and there may be none simpler than McCubbin's website, How Many People Paid a Dollar to See How Many People Paid a Dollar, which the software developer created last spring. The site works like this: You give McCubbin $1, and he'll tell you how many other people also gave him $1 for the same reason. And that's it. "I find the concept of 'selling nothing for something' really interesting," McCubbin tells Motherboard. Motherboard calls the site "genius." That opinion is supported by the events of Thursday night, when so many people apparently tried to pay McCubbin $1 that his site crashed and PayPal started looking into his account for "suspicious activity." McCubbin says his original hope was just to make back the money it cost to register the domain name and host the site, but it's safe to say he's exceeded those expectations. To find out by just how much, you'll have to pay $1. Motherboard does give one clue: "It is more than anyone has any right to make off of a website running one line of text and a PayPal link."