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

While it may seem like a stupid idea...

[east coast]

I think it's a neat idea. How many people are going to scan the page looking at all the various images? You know you have looked at it longer than you've looked at any online ad for a long time.

Different Perspective

[matr0x_x]

OK - I see all these people asking "why the heck would someone pay to advertise on that?" I paid for an advertisement to my http://www.mac-poker.net/Mac Poker site early on - and it brought in TONS of traffic. Mind you the traffic was "silly traffic" (aka it was not targetted and most of it was "browsers" clicking a random pixel) but it was still worth it. Now, I got in at about 80K when the site was still hot hot hot. After about 200K there were two many pixels to click and my clicks went down, and after 500K the sites traffic dropped drastically.

Re:Different Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

So how many clicks did your Slashdot comment with multiple links create?

I call hoax

[RajivSLK]

Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, earned a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet.

I don't believe it. There is no verification that anyone actually paid him anything. I think it's all an ingenious hoax to get the news media (who are known for not verifying anything) to run this story around the world. A stunt to drive traffic to his site and try to earn some money. Ingenious really.

Re:It makes me angry...

[Urusai]

Other bright ideas:

- Beg for money on your website (with a handy PayPal link)
- Sell square inches of lunar real estate
- Sell naming rights to various stars in the galaxy
- Sell prayers (or better yet, indulgences)
- Sell "homeopathic" remedies (tap water)
- Start a "blog" (really a BBS), charge subscriptions for people to entertain themselves
- Make lots of toast, sell on Ebay as "Virgin Mary and/or Jesus and/or Elvis Toast"
- Declare yourself an independent country and sell people citizenship
- Pose as an ousted Nigerian dignitary, promise people a cut of your ill gotten gains, take their money and run (possibly illegal in some jurisdictions)
- Make a bunch of finger paintings, fake your own death, sell your work as high art
- Make some lame Flash cartoons, create an Internet meme ("Badger..", "Trogdor...", etc), sell T-shirts
- Create a blog, sift through a couple of common sites and "aggregate" articles, then post to other people's blogs citing your blog as a news source
- Threaten to kill some cute animal if people don't buy something from you
- Stop bathing, acquire some army-surplus accoutrement, stand on street corners looking dazed with a cup in your hand
- Do something stupid, get humiliated on national TV, do the talk show circuit, become a regular guest on some low-budget game show
- Get a job. But only if you're desperate.