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Cash pours in for student with $1m Web idea
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-12-31 10:57
If you have an envious streak, you probably shouldn't read this.
Because chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in
England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a cool million
dollars in four months on the Internet.
A handout image
shows the Million Dollar Homepage website of Alex Tew December 29, 2005.
Tew had the brainstorm for his million dollar home page called, logically
enough, www.milliondollarhomepage.com. The idea: turn his home page into a
billboard made up of a million dots, and sell them for a dollar a dot to
anyone who wants to put up their logo.
[Reuters] |
Selling porn? Dealing prescription
drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear
when you call up his home page.
He had the brainstorm for his million dollar home page, called, logically
enough, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, while lying in bed thinking out how he
would pay for university.
The idea: turn his home page into a billboard made up of a million dots, and
sell them for a dollar a dot to anyone who wants to put up their logo. A 10 by
10 dot square, roughly the size of a letter of type, costs $100.
He sold a few to his brothers and some friends, and when he had made $1,000,
he issued a press release.
That was picked up by the news media, spread around the Internet, and soon
advertisers for everything from dating sites to casinos to real estate agents to
The Times of London were putting up real cash for pixels, with links to their
own sites.
So far they have bought up 911,800 pixels. Tew's home page now looks like an
online Times Square, festooned with a multi-colored confetti of ads.
"All the money's kind of sitting in a bank account," Tew told Reuters from
his home in Wiltshire, southwest England. "I've treated myself to a car. I've
only just passed my driving test so I've bought myself a little black mini."
The site features testimonials from advertisers, some of whom bought spots as
a lark, only to discover that they were receiving actual valuable Web hits for a
fraction of the cost of traditional Internet advertising.
Meanwhile Tew has had to juggle running the site with his first term at
university, where he is studying business.
"It's been quite a difficulty trying to balance going to lectures and doing
the site," he said.
But he may not have to study for long. Job offers have been coming in from
Internet companies impressed by a young man who managed to figure out an
original way to make money online.
"I didn't expect it to happen like that," Tew said. "To have the job offers
and approaches from investors -- the whole thing is kind of surreal. I'm still
in a state of disbelief."
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