Bonsai Kitten
If Bonsai Kitten were launched today it'd be the subject of an instant Twitter mob, but in 2000 the internet was a slower place and the outrage took longer to build. The site, which didn't really feature kittens grown in various too-small containers, was investigated by the FBI and damned by animal rights campaigners. It's still online in all its millennial glory.
Three Wolf Moon
Antonia Neshev's T-shirt is a victim of Amazon users' occasional outbreaks of ironic product reviewing, which to our minds reached a pinnacle with the reviews of David Hasselhoff's "Looking for… The Best" (the song Hot Shot City is particularly good). But perhaps victim is the wrong word, because the reviews and inevitable parodies put sales of the t-shirt into orbit. Reviews are still being added by people who don't think six years is stretching a thin joke a bit too far.
Golden Palace Casino
Golden Palace is one of the bigger images on the Million Dollar Homepage, and that's because for a few horrible years in the mid-2000s the casino spent an awful lot of cash to try and get itself talked about.
Its main activity was thinking up PR stunts: it bought a frying pan that allegedly had the face of Jesus in it, it snapped up the Pope's old car, it paid a woman $15,000 to tattoo its URL on her head, it bought one of William Shatner's kidney stones on eBay, it spent 28,000 Euros on a football David Beckham lost a penalty with… you get the idea. The site's still going but the stunts have long since stopped.
Ask a Ninja
The internet likes ninjas almost as much as it likes cats, so Ask a Ninja was always likely to gain an audience. The knowingly daft ninja Q&A was bringing in around $100,000 per month at its peak in 2007. The site was relaunched in 2010 but ran out of road shortly afterwards: it's still online but hasn't featured a new question since mid-2011.
