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Student's
million dollar website idea - 30th December 2005
(Credit:
Sydney Morning Herald - AAP)
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 $US1 million ($A1.37
million) 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 $US100 ($A137).
He
sold a few to his brothers and some friends, and when
he had made $US1,000 ($A1,374), 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-coloured 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."
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