A Ugly 1999 Webpage Made by an Internet Cafe Admin Sold for 50 Million Yuan: The Hao123 Story
Buying the user's first click is worth tens of millions, as Baidu proved when it paid 50 million yuan for a static link list. The hao123 story is a reminder that distribution beats features, and the entry-point model keeps showing up in app stores, new-tab extensions, and AI tool rankings today.
The story opens in 1999 when fewer than 10 million Chinese were online, most on dial-up. An internet cafe admin, Li Xingping, kept getting called to fix URL typos, so he hand-wrote a simple list of common sites and put it on every machine. Hao123 was just an HTML table with no backend, no login, and no algorithm, but it solved a real pain: people who couldn't write URLs could now browse.
Baidu bought hao123 in August 2004 for 50 million RMB, years before it became a household name. The price made sense because users started their searches from that page, and Baidu was buying the entry point to search traffic. The revenue model was simple: ad slots, search-box revenue share, paid inclusion, and eventually selling the whole property. After the sale, Li Xingping co-founded 4399 Mini Games, which reached 300 million users by 2008.
The article draws lessons from this: solve your own annoyance, don't expect users to learn, build something opened daily, and don't fear low barriers. It also maps the same logic to today's opportunities like vertical navigation for niche professions, intranet link pages for companies, new-tab extensions, and industry link libraries. The core pattern is owning the daily first click, which survives in app stores, mini-program entrances, and AI tool rankings.
The product's value was the default position in the browser, not the code; Baidu paid for the first click, making 'entry point' the real asset.
The same aggregation logic persists across platforms: app store placements, WeChat recommendations, and AI tool rankings all sell the same real estate.
A static page that never changes can outlast engineered products because its job is to be a starting point, not a destination.
The lesson 'solve your own pain' generalizes, but the 1999 window was unique; the article itself cautions against applying that era's playbook directly today.
This hao123 story made me laugh, the simple stuff solving real needs is the way.