The Guitar Wall Story – Part 1

An iconic groundbreaking platform in its time

The Beginning

A few of you may remember back around early 2006, there was an unusual website that made headlines. It was called the Million Dollar Homepage, and it was developed and launched in the UK by a guy named Alex Tew. It was genius in certain ways. More importantly, it worked. He made a million bucks from it. But, for the most part, it was a one-hit wonder.

Tew made several attempts to replicate the project in different ways, none of which took off. Years later, however, around 2012, he was back on his feet with a new startup, an app called Calm. And a dozen years later, the app has about 4 million subscribers and the company is worth about 2 billion dollars last time I looked.

So, for me, that was the backdrop in late spring, 2007. Fresh off the disappointment of a scrubbed event called GuitarXpo in Long Beach, CA, I was looking to use whatever remained of the show that never happened and move on to the next thing. I had seen Tew’s Million Dollar Homepage previously, but it was only at this moment in time that I asked myself the question: Could I do something similar in the guitar world.

Having already built many websites since the late nineties, I set out to see if anyone had created a knock-off script for Tew’s innovation. In those days, there were sites full of PHP (scripting/programming language) scripts all over the place. To my surprise, I found something very quickly that seemed like it would do the job. I bought the script, which was designed to merely replicate Tew’s page, but I had some different ideas.

First, I felt the main page size was too small, as were the blocks that were available. People needed to be able to see what was actually in those little squares. So, I modified the blocks from 10x10 pixels to 20x20 pixels and I also doubled the size of the page from 1000x1000 pixels to 1000x2000 pixels. And that became the starting point.

The script included a robust administrative backend that allowed me to make further tweaks and also provided a pretty slick method for advertisers to create, purchase and populate their own wall space from start to finish. All they needed to do was create an account, literally draw their space on a grid by selecting as many blocks as they wanted, wherever they wanted them, upload an image and then pay for it with a PayPal interface. And with that, their space would go live.

Each space was designed so that the description entered for the space would pop up as a tool tip when a visitor hovered over any wall space, and a click on the space would send the visitor to the web destination assigned at purchase. Additionally, there was a public index of all the spaces that was sorted based on size. It displayed a thumbnail of the space, as well as the description. From the backend, we could see the number of clicks each space had gotten to date, which could be reported to the wall space owner. From the start in late May 2007, it took me until the end of the summer to get the first of many future iterations of The Guitar Wall ready for prime time (so to speak).

The Reason for this Story

Before I go much further with this – because there’s a lot to it – I want to briefly explain why I’m doing it. It’s been 17 years since I created The Guitar Wall in its original form, which ran for almost 10 years. It was very successful in the early years, and less successful in the later years. Nonetheless, it was a unique and novel project for its time. It involved over 500 guitar-related businesses of one sort or another, and touched a couple of million people around the world during its lifetime. That is significant and the story behind it, that has, for the most part, never been told will be of interest to some. How many I’m not sure. But I believe that GBW on Substack is the best place to present it.

Right now, at this writing, it’s not clear how long this will take or how many parts there will be. 17 years seems like a long time and so much has happened during that period that has transformed our industry (and the world) in many ways. It may be that The Guitar Wall Story is a vehicle that shines a light on those developments, positive or negative as they may be. I won’t be the decider of that. I can only tell the story.

I hope you’ll share any thoughts or questions in the comments section or email me directly at guitarbusiness@substack.com.

Below is the last known screenshot of the original Front Wall from around late 2016. At that time, we were selling some of the abandoned wall spaces that you’ll see in blue. There’s much more (including many more walls) so stay tuned if you’re so inclined.

NOTE: Part 1 of this series is free for all readers, however, you must upgrade to a paid subscription to listen to the GBW Voiceover.