ABOUT.

There is one pixel on this website. It has an owner, a price and a colour, and all three of them are whatever the last person to pay decided they should be. It is a real 1 × 1 element; the page draws it at 120 × 120 so that it is visible at all, and says so underneath, because nobody should be able to claim afterwards that they thought they were buying something bigger.

You can take it from whoever has it, right now, by paying more than they did. When you do, your name goes up in giant type and theirs comes down. Then somebody does the same thing to you.

That is the whole product. It is a joke that takes money, and it is honest about being one.

• —No reserve, no timer, no end. It is for sale every second of every day. There is no auction closing, so there is no moment at which you have “won” anything.
• —The very first sale starts at $1.
• —After that the minimum is always $1 more than the current price. You can pay more than the minimum, and people do.
• —$1,000 is the most any single bid may be — a fat-finger guard, not a judgement about your money.
• —The price only ever goes up. Every owner in the history paid more than the one before them.
• —You choose the pixel’s colour when you buy it and can repaint it as often as you like for as long as you own it. White and near-white are refused: the page is white, and an invisible pixel is indistinguishable from a broken site.
• —The sale history is public: the fifty most recent sales, newest first, with what each owner paid and what colour they made it. The table on the home page lists twenty of them and counts the rest.

The rules are the same list with nothing else around it.

Card payments settle asynchronously, which means two people can pay at the same instant. Only one of those payments can land first. That person gets the pixel. The other one does not.

A bid that loses a simultaneous takeover is not refunded. You are charged in full and you receive nothing. What your money buys is the attempt, and the attempt is what you paid for whichever way it goes.

This is rare. It is not impossible, and the entire design of the bid form is arranged around telling you before it happens rather than afterwards: the sentence is set in inverted type above the button, there is a tick you have to perform that says it back in the first person, and Stripe’s own payment page repeats it next to the amount you are about to be charged. It is also in the rules and twice in the terms.

The same goes for the ordinary case, which is not rare at all: when somebody outbids you, you receive nothing. No refund, no share of what they paid, no credit. Assume it will happen within minutes, because it usually does. If that is not something you want to pay for, do not pay for it.

• —It is not gambling. There is nothing to win and no draw to enter. This site makes no payouts of any kind, to anyone, ever, and nothing of value is ever won here.
• —It is not an investment. The pixel has no resale value, because there is no mechanism by which anyone could ever sell it to anybody. The previous owner receives nothing when you take it; that is the design, not an oversight.
• —It is not a token, a share, an asset or an NFT. Nothing is minted, nothing is on a chain, and you own nothing off this page.
• —It is not property. You are buying a display slot: a name of your choosing shown next to one pixel, for exactly as long as this website chooses to show it.

Because the asymmetry is funny and everybody understands it instantly. There is no explanation to read, no strategy, no tier list and no metagame — one number, one name, and the certainty that both will be somebody else’s before long.

It is entertainment, sold as entertainment. We would rather it be obvious what you are paying for than have it be a surprise, which is why the loud parts of this site are the disclosures rather than the buy button.

There is a sibling to it: OpenBoss, a world boss with one public health pool that everybody hits at once. Same idea, same no-payouts rule, opposite personality. It shares this site’s backend and nothing else.

The Pixel is operated by Flisko — Informacijske storitve, Žiga Flis s.p., in Slovenia. There is no team page because there is no team.

ziga@flisko.si reaches a person. Write about a payment that went wrong, a name that should come down, or something on these pages that turns out not to be true — the contact page says what to put in the message so that we can find you.

• —Rules — the mechanics, in bullets, with nothing else around them.
• —Terms — what you are buying, that it is final, and the whole no-payouts statement.
• —Privacy — every single thing this site holds about you, which is a short list.
• —Contact — one address, and what we can and cannot do about things.