Early in the history of the Internet, some high school kid set up a web page with a 1000x1000 image and a limited color palette. He sold individual pixels, plus a link from that pixel to anywhere, for $1. Yup, he sold them all in fairly short order.
The sad thing is none of those logos and links have any meaning any more, almost all of them go to 404s, domain parked pages, or completely unrelated sites, and even when they were new they went to scummy ecommerce or porn sites. In 12 years, the imagery on /r/place will still hold meaning and the timelapses will still tell a pretty cool story.
It's like an old photograph of Times Square, where most businesses shown are long defunct and many were of dubious character. Nonetheless, it still holds meaning and tells a pretty cool story.
The reddit experiment is way more interesting. Everything on million dollar homepage is trashy ads for very shady websites. /r/Place is populated by fan communities and jokes and memes. I set it as my desktop background and still keep finding interesting things in it.
Early in the history of the Internet, some high school kid set up a web page with a 1000x1000 image and a limited color palette. He sold individual pixels, plus a link from that pixel to anywhere, for $1. Yup, he sold them all in fairly short order.