Slashdot Mirror
Cash Pours in for Student with $1 Million Web Idea
Quantum Logic writes "Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, earned a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet. Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels. 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."
You can be the smartest guy on the block with many awesome ideas, but it seems to repeatedly be the simplest/dumbest ones which get you rich quick.
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Am I the only one who thinks this site has been blown way out of proportion? Sure the creator promises that your ad will be in place until 2010, but honestly, who is going to view that page more than once ? Especially since in the FAQ it states that you are not allowed to modify your images once they have been posted. This page is going to be stagnet for the next 5 years and the visitor numbers will drop substantialy after the first few months.
Call me a cynic, but I wonder... how successful or truthful was Alex's sale of $911k in advertising *before* national press attention (msnbc /. ap etc)?
.... DAMN :/ there goes my 1 BILLLLLLLLION dollars
Clearly anyone who bought advertising space is cashing in right now, but I wonder if this guy is saying hehas sold $911K so that he can REALLY sell the last 88,200$ in space and actually make money.
whatever the answer -- creative and cunning...
It looks like billiondollarhomepage.com was registered 2weeks after milliondollarhomepage.com
well I think you're missing the point of what they see in him
and quite the opposite argument can be made, look at nobel laureates, how many of them did any significant work after the work that won them the prize, some do, but in proportion to the expectations you have?
coming up with one good idea unfortunately isn't a sure fire predictor of future good ideas
rather what they see in him I think is that he has what it takes to transform an idea into real world action
there's a lot more people out there with grandiose "good" ideas than there are people with the skills to take one of them and turn it into real world profit
griping that there's nothing special about this kid just makes you look petty and jealous
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And his is an ad-cluttered site. You probably have to derate the price by a factor of 5 or so. At which point you've reached the English-speaking population of the planet as the breakeven point.
>A year from now, this site wont exist, but the kid is set for life. Why? He didn't demonstrate a knack for business or marketing or anything like that, much less a unique talent.
Oh, I seriously disagree. This guy figured out a way to sell something that there's an infinite supply of, pixels, for lots of money, *and* to get people talking about him doing it. If that's not a knack for marketing, I don't know what is. Marketing is demand creation, pure and simple.
Did he create something of actual value? No, of course not. Did he create the perception of value? Definitely, for people who purchased his "wares". And creating the perception of value is the most valuable thing of all in today's "service economy".
People still don't get it. There's like 20 ads on his own page linking to copycat sites selling or renting pixels... This is retarded.
Pixels have no value, cloning his site a million times has no value. It's the original idea that matters, and he thought of it first and implemented it first.
The rest is internet history.
This is a bit like that. Most "real" ads are carefully placed in an enviroment/surrounding were you already would be looking and hopefully attract your attention. So for instance the huge blank space between the slashdot dupe and the comments, eh I mean the nice blinking ad that I did not filter out because I do not steal from cowboyneal is placed there because hopefully as you scroll down you will see the ad and become intrested.
This guys adsite however has no content apart from the ads. So why should people visit it apart from pure curiousity. Surely this would not result in any hits?
TV regulators at least do not seem to think so. The programs that show the funniest ads are usually not regulated as a half hour advertisement blok would be. The BBC and most european channels could not show them if anyone thought that a commercial shown during such a program would result in extra sales.
I can understand that people might want to pay X amuunt of money to have their face plasterd on times square or something, but to pay money to get your image on a guys homepage with no other content? I truly just don't get it. Either all the "advertisers" see it as a joke OR advertisers are stupid OR and this is worse. This guys site actually works. People really will visit a site with nothing but ads and generate sales.
This could be bad. If this continues slashvertisements will soon be the only content. TV channels will be nothing but ads with the occasional break for the station logo. And it will work. ARGH!
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Further, there are only six cities in the US with the population density to support light rail (in the rest, buses would actually be more efficient).
In my experience (Vancouver BC) building mass transit creates demand for high density housing. We built our first rapid transit line in 1986, and ten years later you could see residential towers around most of the stations - wherever the municipal governments allowed it. In 2001 we opened a second line and the towers are there already. These are 20-30 story residential towers, in groups of 3-10 around most stations, where previously there were just some old houses. The towers being built now have integrated commercial development, ie: a good grocery store and basic services are less than a 5 minute walk from your apartment. Provided there is demand for real-estate, why not build this way ? People don't want to drive an hour or more to work, and then drive again to the grocery store, and again to the mall, etc. You can waste your entire life sitting in traffic. Rapid transit has network effects. The system becomes more valuable as you build it, and if cities aren't building it now because their density is low then they are completely backwards.
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