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Cash pours in for student with $1 million Web idea

bartboy9891

I'm not Moe
Joined
Dec 1, 2004
Messages
9,121
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.

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."
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ Link fixed by Viper, you posted a clone of it
that was a damn good idea. but he can't be all that smart, he had all that money and he bought a mini. :lol:
 
The site does not look attractive and I don't think you can easily notice any site.
But the idea has to be creidted... Really Brilliant.
 
Isn't this old news? I've read all about those sites when the smash my viper thread appeared.
 
Amazing how the most simplest idea is the most lucrative.
 
I wonder who actually buys that small advertising space for $100 ... you can't even notice those things, and who really frequents that site enough to give enough hits to justify that investment ? All I have to say is, if you wanna get noticed, you gotta invest about 1000 bucks, which cannot be justified by hits ... you gotta be stupid to "buy a square" lol
 
Well click the link to find out, duh.

Mini is a good choice. practical and inexpensive compared to what he's earned. He can save that money better with a cheap car.
 
Can you give us a link to the original article.

Thanks!! :)
 
lol, i linked to milliondollarwebpage :oops:
didnt know this was such old news.
 
looks like a beautifully knitted quilt. :lol:
 
Will be hilarious if he would actually end up in some bigshot advertising company :). He sounds like a real one-day-fly, although he will be able to live for more than a couple ofd ays with that money...
 
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