Registered: Mar 2002
Location: My Own Reality
Posts: 321

Pipe Dream
How Selling Pixels May Yield a Million Bucks
November 22, 2005; Page B1

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.


Alex Tew sells tiny ad spaces on his Web page (inset) and has generated $623,800 toward his $1 million goal.


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.)

Mr. Tew pledged to keep the site up for at least five years.

http://online.wsj.com/public/articl....html?mod=blogs

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

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Registered: Sep 2000
Location: The Bottom of the Toyem Pole
Posts: 9455

"Last Chance To Send In Your Dollar!"

Tom Corven is kind of a cool find, but that assessment is conditional on what I find when I listen to it.

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Registered: Jul 2005
Location: different
Posts: 5216

amazing

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Registered: Feb 2004
Location: in colorado somewhere!
Posts: 26144

This guy is a fucking genious. He really should copywrite the idea though. Something this simple will generate a whole lot of others with copycat sites.
But then......

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Registered: Jan 2001
Location: library
Posts: 19584

A lot like the dumb bint who put herself in debt and then started a site to beg for money?

Yeah.

Yet another reason to hearken back to my logs to remind myself that humanity really is that stupid.

-m

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Registered: Feb 2004
Location: in colorado somewhere!
Posts: 26144

So how much will 5 years of bandwith or whatever cost this person?

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Registered: Jan 2001
Location: library
Posts: 19584

Depends on how much bandwidth he uses.

-m

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Registered: Jan 2001
Location: Zion
Posts: 4521

quote:

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Originally posted by Large Filipino
This guy is a fucking genious. He really should copywrite the idea though. Something this simple will generate a whole lot of others with copycat sites.
But then......

---

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Registered: Jan 2001
Location: library
Posts: 19584

Also depends on how it is set up, if, for instance, all the actual ads are hosted on the site of the company they belong to, and simply hotlinked, very little, no matter how much traffic he gets. If he is actually hosting the ads, a bit more, but still, probably not a whole lot unless the ads are high resolution and/or animated.

-m

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Registered: May 2004
Location: New York
Posts: 809

Simply amazing...what will they think of next?

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: Disgusting den of creepitude
Posts: 10557

Sell some crack. Six zeros in no time.

(just lay off your own stash)

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