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."
since the submitter copied half the article, here's the rest:
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."
...cause I didn't think of it first. :(
It's so simple! *bangs head on table*
google.slashdot
The Million Dollar homepage
oops forgot the obligatory WOOOT!!! FP
$1 buys you a character. I hope to collect a cool $120 by the time this is all over.
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.
The site got unexpected high hits from slashdot :) which means more sales.
I lost my signature... help!
It'd be an interesting way to get your message out to some more people though, if you weren't trying to sell something.
This Internet thing is tweaking human communication in interesting ways. I like it.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
...there's a sucker born every minute.
Or in this case, at least 10,000 in 4 months.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Come on, wouldn't you want to click on a link that says "Even Monkeys Fall From Trees"
I think the runner up (for me at least) is "Don't Click"
because the alt text says: Fine, if you really must click, go ahead...
P.S. I found Waldo in the pic too
Just the picture (without the link overlay)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Well looks like he'll need that money for a new server...
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com
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.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is seriously old news. Like, from September old. What next, are we going to get an editorial about this new phenomenon called "blogging"?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
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
What I don't understand is why anyone would pay for advertising here. According to my Google Toolbar in FireFox, the site has a PR of 0. I actually considered buying an incoming link for a dollar since it could have been worth getting alink from a PR 5 or higher site, but it has basically no linked value.
Maybe after all this press though, we'll see the page's PR go up and then make it highly worth it to buy a 1 dollar block just to get a link on that page.
Hagrin.com
You're missing something, probably a 21st century browser.
I read his blog earlier today before it hit slashdot, he writes a fair amount about traffic hits, I wonder if /. will rate a mention...
C'mon people, visit his page at least once. Dammit there should have been a link in the summary.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
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.
... his cool million will be wiped out by his bandwidth bills.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
and I'll say it again. Google doesn't give up-to-date PageRank figures through the toolbar (IIRC they update figures every few weeks/months), primarily to hinder the efforts of SEO types. Without instant feedback, it's more difficult to figure out how to game the system. I would imagine that the site's actual PR is quite high, since it already made the rounds in the media quite some time ago and got many links from sites with high PR.
This is so old news... I am spechless to see so many slashdotters reading this for the first time. Check http://www.thepixelwars.com/
ok, who wants to chip in to get a goatse up on this page?
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.
Once again proving that it isn't how smart you are or how hard you work but who you know. It sounds like he got his start by knowing friends and family that could pour a little money into his idea and help get him started. THAT is what is needed more than a really clever idea.
Not saying that this kid isn't smart but just that this doesn't really prove anything. It's more luck and connections working in his favor. Charging per pixel is a reasonable idea but is it really so much better than any other pricing scheme?
If you're smart then worry less about school and your job and more about meeting people in other areas of influence - business, marketing, finance, etc. With those kinds of people your ideas will be able to take seed and make you and them money. A little work if your family doesn't come from money but still very possible.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The site has a pagerank 7/10 which is actually pretty good in terms of internet publicity.
Getting your own site linked on a 7/10 site will do wonders for your own Pagerank.
Thus those pixels may be worth more than they seem.
The question is how google will treat that amount of links, if it will accept them in the PR calculations.
- sell your signature space on slashdot for advertisments
:-)
Any takers?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
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!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Are you that stupid? Or are you just intentionally lying?
We don't subsidize cars, we tax the living S*** out of them!! Cars put money in the government's pocket. Gas would be between $1-$1.50 per gallon if the government didn't tax it!! Federal taxes alone are 21% of the cost of gas. Now add state and local taxes to that. And that is just end user taxes. Nothing about the taxes and regulations on the businesses that make, transport, or sell gas.
Then we have car license fees, title fees, driver fees, insurance fees, toll roads. The cost of driving is well passed on to the consumer.
Building roads is a primary government function. Has been since Sumer. Police, Military, Roads, and now Education (which you apparently missed) are the 4 primary functions of government.
"runoff"
Do you even know what a subsidy is? Look junior, if you are going to use big words you may want to look them up in the dictionary.
Yeah, yeah, my comments are a bit aggressive, but they are not flamebait or a troll (although modding down political opinion seems Salshdot's pastime) I just don't see why I should tolerate your intolerable bullshit.
Almost every post is about "why didn't I think about it first", either directly or indirectly. So all that is left from 5000 years of human history is the desire to ...get rich? if the /. crowd, that is supposed to be geeks and interested in a varied set of interests primarily around science, reacts in that way in the mention of 1 million dollars, then our sociery is really doomed. In a few years, nobody will be left to care about values, about science, about humanity, and those that will do so will be in for the money. It is a very sad day to read Slashdot...
Not to be a wet blanket or anything, but I'm completely missing the brilliance here. It seems like he's essentially selling rather overpriced banner-ad space, without any content to drive traffic or visitor click-throughs (I guess relying entirely on the notoriety of the site in the press?)
I'm having trouble understanding how firms would really think it's a wise investment to spend $x dollars advertising on a website that has zero draw. Who cares if the banner will be up there for 5 years if no one has incentive to visit the hosting website? I skimmed the FAQ, looking for promises of content or incentive for traffic, and here's all I found --
Um, "Why would millions of people visit this website?" would be a good follow-up question. I imagine that neither I nor many other people stay up in the wee hours of the night to watch collections of paid programming advertisements or flip straight to the adverstising section of a magazine. Why would I go to a website that is just a big billboard?
I checked out the "Testimonials", which I'm skeptical of, to say the least. Lots of references to making "Internet history". Maybe I'm just completely out of it, but I really don't see how pooling a shitload of static banner-ads onto one page constitutes "Internet history".
With all this in mind, I once again raise the question how this is "genius". Clever? Sure. Exploiting of ignorance and gimmicky? Possibly. Genius? No. At best, I would say this is a lucky flash-in-the-pan bit that will never work twice, unless browsing websites devoted entirely to advertising space becomes profoundly interesting in the future.
However, if I've overlooked some massive details, or I'm not making the appropriate connections, please tell me, because I'm still in disbelief that this works on any level. An MBA I am not, so if there's some sort of defined principles for what constitutes genius in the business world, it's lost on me. Or maybe this is genius of the P.T Barnum ilk? Regardless, if this site really is riding on the coattails of its own notoriety, I guess he deserves kudos for creating such a buzz (no matter how gimmicky and seemingly undeserving such buzz is), and at least he's using the money for college (or so it is stated), and not on a new mansion or something completely materialistic in value.
"You and your third dimension."
Cause Manboobs says so.
"MillionDollarHomePage.com has proved to be a fantastic investment for manboobs.co.uk. For a relatively small outlay our hits have increased 10 fold in 2 days. Great idea which really works. Thanks Alex !"
Ian Whitcombe
www.manboobs.co.uk
Pixels purchased: 100
All nice about the money making. I am more interested if he does it all by hand or does it with a script or program. Placing the stuff must be a hell of a job considering not all sqares are the same size.
e -map.png is the image you see.
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/img-pix/imag
Who cares about the money? I want to know how it works.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
...of blipverts.
"It's only after we've lost anything that we're free to do anything."