Cash Pours in for Student with $1 Million Web Idea 527
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."
Just goes to show... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cool idea .... (Score:0, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet hulla hoop? (Score:4, Insightful)
Forethought? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Forethought? (Score:3, Insightful)
But yet, everyone seems to believe it. I don't know what to criticize people for.
Re:rest of the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, he made a significant amount of money in a short time, which seems to be the model the new economy [fastcompany.com] is adopting, but it's not sustainable business. In 2 months, who is going to care about a site full of ads with no content?
The kid had a good idea, and got lucky, but that doesn't make him anything special, and given the nature of the money (i.e. accrued with very little effort on his part), I don't think he gained any experience that will make him an asset to any of these companies offering him a job. This is winning the lottery, not entrepreneurial success (not to say there isn't a lot of luck in entrepreneurship).
This is not news, it's barely human interest, and its not anything anyone will care about even next week (except the people seeing the dupe for the first time).
Nothing to see here, please move along.
Traffic analysis (Score:4, Insightful)
C'mon people, visit his page at least once [milliondol...mepage.com]. Dammit there should have been a link in the summary.
Re:rest of the article (Score:5, Insightful)
and quite the opposite argument can be made, look at nobel laureates, how many of them did any significant work after the work that won them the prize, some do, but in proportion to the expectations you have?
coming up with one good idea unfortunately isn't a sure fire predictor of future good ideas
rather what they see in him I think is that he has what it takes to transform an idea into real world action
there's a lot more people out there with grandiose "good" ideas than there are people with the skills to take one of them and turn it into real world profit
griping that there's nothing special about this kid just makes you look petty and jealous
Re:I call hoax (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:rest of the article (Score:3, Insightful)
This may surprise you, but not everyone in the world has a driver's license at age 16. Hell, in a lot of countries the minimum age is 17, 18, or even higher. And believe it or not, in large portions of the world a substantial (majority?) of people don't have a driver's license and depend on public transit systems like rails, subways, and busses. It's a shame that most US citizens can't comprehend the benefits to society of having a good solid public transit system over a crappy (or non existant) public transist with everyone having their own vehicle and thus treat public transit like a disease they want nothing to do with; some even going as far as to redicule anyone who would even think of using public transit. You'd think after 20 or 30 minutes of rush hour traffic just about anyone would be converted..
Maybe that wasn't his reason... maybe he just didn't need a car and thus didn't care, maybe he couldn't afford one, or maybe he is a horrible driver. Doesn't really matter, because I don't care about the original topic anymore.. My point still stands in general.
Re:Holy old news. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I call hoax (Score:5, Insightful)
And his is an ad-cluttered site. You probably have to derate the price by a factor of 5 or so. At which point you've reached the English-speaking population of the planet as the breakeven point.
Re:The Million Dollar homepage (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone else see this as being a "topsite" that doesn't fairly rank the sites, just sells out to the highest bidder?
Imagine if google sold the top 10 slots for each of the top 1,000,000 words searched, i would think they would get more than $1bil, but then, no one would go there anymore
Re:rest of the article (Score:2, Insightful)
In most of the US, a public transportation system would be more expensive than cars. Buses are great and all, but if they always run less than a quarter full, they're actually less efficient than cars (because they are so much bigger). Further, there are only six cities in the US with the population density to support light rail (in the rest, buses would actually be more efficient).
The only way public transit would work in the US would be if people stopped moving out of cities and started moving back. Good public transit requires that kind of clumpiness. The subway systems in New York, Boston, and DC are incredible. However, they simply wouldn't work in other cities. Who wants to wait an hour for a train? Heck, I don't like waiting fifteen minutes for a bus!
Re:rest of the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I seriously disagree. This guy figured out a way to sell something that there's an infinite supply of, pixels, for lots of money, *and* to get people talking about him doing it. If that's not a knack for marketing, I don't know what is. Marketing is demand creation, pure and simple.
Did he create something of actual value? No, of course not. Did he create the perception of value? Definitely, for people who purchased his "wares". And creating the perception of value is the most valuable thing of all in today's "service economy".
Re:rest of the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Like PT Barnum said... (Score:2, Insightful)
But can you call them suckers? People are actually clicking through the ads. Seems like they are getting better than they paid for.
Noone gets it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Pagerank 7/10 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:rest of the article (Score:1, Insightful)
Europe had the luxury of a couple of dozen centuries to bulk up the populations over small areas. They have little idea how large the US really is. I'm always amused at their reactions when I encounter new comers who have driven from NY to California, taken Amtrak or Greyhound.
I don't get it. I mean how does this work? (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
You smarmy jack assed troll (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
You know what I bet? (Score:1, Insightful)
A sad day to read /. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:rest of the article (Score:3, Insightful)
The gambling industry creates entertainment. Creating entertainment is creating value to those who appreciate that particular form of entertainment. As with all forms of entertainment, it may be of a kind that you do not particularily enjoy. Fortunately, you are free to abstain from participating in it if you don't like it. Great, huh!
What is your take on the movie industry? Don't they create anything of value either? Artists? Writers of fiction?
Lawyers add value by helping make sure that everyone follows agreements on how to behave in society. Not all lawyers create value while doing so, for different reasons. In fact, one may argue that the current situation in the US is such that most lawyers don't create value to anyone except themselves. But blanket statements about slicing pies instead of baking them are confused and incorrect.
Re:rest of the article (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience (Vancouver BC) building mass transit creates demand for high density housing. We built our first rapid transit line in 1986, and ten years later you could see residential towers around most of the stations - wherever the municipal governments allowed it. In 2001 we opened a second line and the towers are there already. These are 20-30 story residential towers, in groups of 3-10 around most stations, where previously there were just some old houses. The towers being built now have integrated commercial development, ie: a good grocery store and basic services are less than a 5 minute walk from your apartment. Provided there is demand for real-estate, why not build this way ? People don't want to drive an hour or more to work, and then drive again to the grocery store, and again to the mall, etc. You can waste your entire life sitting in traffic. Rapid transit has network effects. The system becomes more valuable as you build it, and if cities aren't building it now because their density is low then they are completely backwards.
Re:Help me out here... (Score:5, Insightful)
In short, I don't understand what you don't understand.
Re:rest of the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Different Perspective (Score:1, Insightful)
the site is a link farm and what chance do you have of getting your ad clicked out of the 1 million pixels ?
without the media the guy wouldnt have gotten anywhere.
Re:It makes me angry... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just goes to show... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:rest of the article (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You smarmy jack assed troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:rest of the article (Score:1, Insightful)
Private parties in a lush yard
Space for your children to play safely
Space for a barbecue pit
Not having to see your neighbors
Not having to hear your neighbors fucking, fighting, smashing things, or anything else
Not having your neighbors hear about your personal life
Being able to have a garden
Having clean drinking water that hasn't been chlorinated to ass
Lower crime rates
Aesthetics
Cities are disgusting, obnoxious, loud, dirty shitholes. And some people just go there to work and shop, and want to leave when they're done to a nice, pleasant environment that sucks for working and shopping but is relaxing, clean, and pretty.
Re:rest of the article (Score:1, Insightful)
The point is that creating that fad (Was it one? I had never even heard of it before, despite its age. It looks like a warez website without the warez, really.) and profiting from it isn't respectable to the audience. Few people respect get-rich-quick schemes. And without any data about the ROI for the advertisers, it's easy to assume that few if any advertisers received one. In which case he managed to convince a bunch of people to waste their money on ineffective advertising. Which is probably the majority of advertising anyway, but the tactic is up there with companies that sell schemes on TV to people that wish to WORK FROM HOME FOR $8K A MONTH.