Posted on 11/22/2005 6:52:32 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
It was just a few months ago that 21-year-old Alex Tew of Great Britain was stumped about how to pay for college. He'd filled a notebook with ideas before jotting down this simple, if rather audacious, query to himself: How Can I Become a Millionaire?
In the annals of entrepreneurship, what followed is an instructional tale of how a brainstorm, coupled with the Internet's powerful word-of-mouth culture, can set a trend in motion with lightning speed. Mr. Tew says his strategy was to find an idea simple to understand and cheap to set up, with a catchy name that would garner attention online, where he gained experience from having free-lanced as a Web designer for a few years.
Ultimately, his solution amounted to making money via Internet advertising -- but with a twist. Instead of selling banner ads, text links or splashy videolike ads that fill a screen, Mr. Tew opted to hawk the simplest graphical denominator of a computer screen: the pixel. A pixel is a tiny dot of light and color, and each screen has tens of thousands of them.
Mr. Tew created a home page, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, where he divided the screen into 10,000 small squares of 100 pixels each. His plan: to sell the pixels for $1 a piece, with a minimum order of 100 pixels. In each space, buyers could put a graphical ad of their choosing that links to their own site when clicked on. The end result is a cluttered collage of ads in various shapes and colors all amassed on a single digital billboard. (Mr. Tew doesn't charge his advertisers anything when a visitor clicks on the ads.)
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Hah! Now that he's a millionaire he can skip all that and retire!
If I'm ever at a loss for an online poker party...
Hope you have a good firewall or anti-adware program.
I went to his link when he started. It only had a few squares filled in then. I didn't think it would go very far. Little did I know.
Good post....interesting story.
I think the pure ugliness of the page is somehow part of the attraction -- maybe the counter to beautiful web pages?
NAT Router + software firewall on computer + Macintosh. I hope that's enough layers of protection.
Good for this enterprising young man for finding an honest, creative way to make lots of money. I don't why anyone would want to visit this page voluntarily though, but apparently someone must.
=== Alex Tew of Great Britain was stumped about how to pay for college. ===
"Hah! Now that he's a millionaire he can skip all that and retire!"
Great idea, but I don't think a million is going to make it.
1 million at 5% interest works out to $50K/year which is not going to keep him living too well. I suspect he is going to sell a few more of these. I wonder if he got a patent or copyright on it?
I think the busy-ness is what makes it interesting. It demands a certain amount of creativity on the advertiser's part to get their ad within the interest of the viewer. I am thinking that there may be advertising strategies that work with this.
For example, a bullseye? A totally yellow square with a red dot in the middle? A cross? What would you put in a 10x10 spot to gather the most hits? What would be the minimum number of pixels to obtain the maximum hit rate/pixel?
Mark me down as "damn it...why didnt I think of that?"
Reminds me a little of the pet rock (I'm probably dating myself with that one). Hat's off to this bloke. Nice going.
He's going to have to make several millions if he wants to retire now.
Probably...but I could use $643K right about now.
Well, I would hope that the price is per month or quarter or something. If it's a one-time price, that would be foolish. Otherwise, the money will keep rolling in for some time to come.
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