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."
While it may seem like a stupid idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
Brilliant (Score:1, Interesting)
Different Perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It makes me angry... (Score:3, Interesting)
that someone else copied the idea
www.mymilliondollaradpage.com/
And advertised for it on the orignal guy's site.
Is that sneaky or what?
Page Rank (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe after all this press though, we'll see the page's PR go up and then make it highly worth it to buy a 1 dollar block just to get a link on that page.
I call hoax (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't believe it. There is no verification that anyone actually paid him anything. I think it's all an ingenious hoax to get the news media (who are known for not verifying anything) to run this story around the world. A stunt to drive traffic to his site and try to earn some money. Ingenious really.
Re:rest of the article (Score:1, Interesting)
implied # of visitors for $1M (Score:1, Interesting)
This site gets untargeted traffic - let's value it at $0.05/click.
Paying $1 million implies 20M clicks from the main page to the ads.
Let's assume that a visitor curiously clicks on 2 ads.
That works out to 10M visitors.
Anyone know how many visitors it's gotten so far?
Re:It makes me angry... (Score:5, Interesting)
- Beg for money on your website (with a handy PayPal link)
- Sell square inches of lunar real estate
- Sell naming rights to various stars in the galaxy
- Sell prayers (or better yet, indulgences)
- Sell "homeopathic" remedies (tap water)
- Start a "blog" (really a BBS), charge subscriptions for people to entertain themselves
- Make lots of toast, sell on Ebay as "Virgin Mary and/or Jesus and/or Elvis Toast"
- Declare yourself an independent country and sell people citizenship
- Pose as an ousted Nigerian dignitary, promise people a cut of your ill gotten gains, take their money and run (possibly illegal in some jurisdictions)
- Make a bunch of finger paintings, fake your own death, sell your work as high art
- Make some lame Flash cartoons, create an Internet meme ("Badger..", "Trogdor...", etc), sell T-shirts
- Create a blog, sift through a couple of common sites and "aggregate" articles, then post to other people's blogs citing your blog as a news source
- Threaten to kill some cute animal if people don't buy something from you
- Stop bathing, acquire some army-surplus accoutrement, stand on street corners looking dazed with a cup in your hand
- Do something stupid, get humiliated on national TV, do the talk show circuit, become a regular guest on some low-budget game show
- Get a job. But only if you're desperate.
Re:I call hoax (Score:2, Interesting)
In common with many others here, I think it says something very odd about the way we view the media that a site like this has become such a success, but don't knock a guy for having an original idea
helps to get paid from friends and family (Score:3, Interesting)
Not saying that this kid isn't smart but just that this doesn't really prove anything. It's more luck and connections working in his favor. Charging per pixel is a reasonable idea but is it really so much better than any other pricing scheme?
If you're smart then worry less about school and your job and more about meeting people in other areas of influence - business, marketing, finance, etc. With those kinds of people your ideas will be able to take seed and make you and them money. A little work if your family doesn't come from money but still very possible.
Even better idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Any takers?
Re:I call hoax (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:rest of the article (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I assure you the town I live in is plenty 'clumpy' enough to support a good public transit system, however I doubt any of the bus routes here have more than a quarter full for more than a couple hours a day. It's not that people aren't here to support it, but because everyone seems to be taught to treat public transit like a disease they want nothing to do with and that they need to have their own car.
To make matters worse the bus system here was designed around a busy downtown, which is now nearly desolate (save for bars, bars, and more bars), so they are shut down an hour too early to take a bus home if you work a 'normal' 9-5 job... If the bus system can't support people working 9-5 jobs, it's lost out on a huge part of it's potention passengers.
Oh yeah... shouldn't be hard to see I think the politicians here are among the ones that think public transit is a disease.
Re:Different Perspective (Score:4, Interesting)
Help me out here... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to be a wet blanket or anything, but I'm completely missing the brilliance here. It seems like he's essentially selling rather overpriced banner-ad space, without any content to drive traffic or visitor click-throughs (I guess relying entirely on the notoriety of the site in the press?)
I'm having trouble understanding how firms would really think it's a wise investment to spend $x dollars advertising on a website that has zero draw. Who cares if the banner will be up there for 5 years if no one has incentive to visit the hosting website? I skimmed the FAQ, looking for promises of content or incentive for traffic, and here's all I found --
Um, "Why would millions of people visit this website?" would be a good follow-up question. I imagine that neither I nor many other people stay up in the wee hours of the night to watch collections of paid programming advertisements or flip straight to the adverstising section of a magazine. Why would I go to a website that is just a big billboard?
I checked out the "Testimonials", which I'm skeptical of, to say the least. Lots of references to making "Internet history". Maybe I'm just completely out of it, but I really don't see how pooling a shitload of static banner-ads onto one page constitutes "Internet history".
With all this in mind, I once again raise the question how this is "genius". Clever? Sure. Exploiting of ignorance and gimmicky? Possibly. Genius? No. At best, I would say this is a lucky flash-in-the-pan bit that will never work twice, unless browsing websites devoted entirely to advertising space becomes profoundly interesting in the future.
However, if I've overlooked some massive details, or I'm not making the appropriate connections, please tell me, because I'm still in disbelief that this works on any level. An MBA I am not, so if there's some sort of defined principles for what constitutes genius in the business world, it's lost on me. Or maybe this is genius of the P.T Barnum ilk? Regardless, if this site really is riding on the coattails of its own notoriety, I guess he deserves kudos for creating such a buzz (no matter how gimmicky and seemingly undeserving such buzz is), and at least he's using the money for college (or so it is stated), and not on a new mansion or something completely materialistic in value.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)