1 million pixels sold!
Summer of 2005 was nearing its end in my home country England, when a young man by the name of Alex Tew was about to enter University. He thought that it was insane that he’d have go to university for 4 or 5 years and then come out owing tens of thousands of pounds. So, he had this silly little idea … let’s put up a website with one million pixels of advertising space and sell each pixel for £1, keep all of the ads up forever or at least for five years, (actually the homepage is still up), and use that money to pay for his schooling, easy! If he sold hundreds, possibly thousands or even more of the pixel advertising spots over the course of the next few years – maybe he’d earn enough to pay for his school fees.
A good idea, hey?
So, he registered milliondollarhomepage.com, got a friend or two to buy a couple hundred dollar spots, and alerted the press. The idea took off like wildfire. Media outlet after media outlet began picking up the story — next thing you know, he’s got thousands of visitors to his site every day … a few websites thought “what the heck” and started buying advertising space too … then more visitors, more sales … the idea just took off! He raked in over $400,000 in his first 7 weeks of launching the site! Let me say that again — four hundred thousand dollars in electronic funds being transferred via PayPal, 2checkout, and wire transfers.
Brilliant!
I love this story, it really demonstrates the power of the internet, website design and how to use it as a tool, let the website do ALL the work. All you need to do is pick up the pay check!
Of course nowadays there’s many websites that do exactly this: personalized birthday cards (fully automated; from your computer, to the dynamic digital printer to the post office), auction websites – server software handles the bidding, transactions, end users send and receive (ebay), Online Payment Gateways such as PayPal, Affiliate websites/blogs that ‘feed in’ products from popular online resellers, and get a % of the sale (lucieslist.com) and many, many more. Of course these examples are behemoth and can employ 1000’s but the core concept is there.
Put a service or product online that a website can automate – if it takes off, you can be set for life. Do you have the next big idea? Give us a call – we can make it happen 786. 379. 4042 or email info@justine39.sg-host.com
