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."

Comments

Forethought?

[KRYnosemg33]

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)?

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 .... DAMN :/ there goes my 1 BILLLLLLLLION dollars

Re:rest of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Holy old news.

[Lord_Dweomer]

Just to show how ridiculously old this is, there are people selling friggin scripts that will automate the whole process of creating this kind of page. In fact, there are so many clones out there that there are already directories of them. The kid got lucky, but anybody else hoping to cash in will not be so lucky. You see, this is a one time fee that people pay, and they pay for the traffic that is generated by the press. You only get the press if you're original...ie. the guy who started this. You won't get it if you're just a clone.