Alex Tew is only 21 years-old. But he’s already a lot richer than you.
No, he didn’t inherit anything in a will or get hold of a trust fund.
Instead, the British student who was simply looking for a way to finance his university education wound up earning a million dollars in four short months.
How did he do it? By selling pixels. Yes, pixels, those tiny little dots that make up the images on your computer screen.
Tew decided to turn his home page, aptly called milliondollarhomepage.com into a place where he would literally sell those 10X10 square dots for $100 each.
He sold the first few to some family members and a friend and before he knew it, he’d made an easy grand.
Figuring he was on to a good thing, Tew quickly issued a press release, and then the fun really began. He started to receive calls from media outlets about his ‘million dollar’ idea.
That was soon followed by interest from real clients, like dating services, real estate agencies and casinos.
Each buy as many pixels as they like and get links to their respective home pages.
Resting your mouse over any of the entries, which taken together look like a massive jumble of colours and logos, brings up a little description of what each represents.
There are notices barking “download free movies” and “get your ringtones,” a link to what’s called the ‘biggest Oriental kosher food supplier in the world’, a place that sells vintage T-shirts, one for something labelled “The Alaska Mint”, where you can buy authentic northern jewelry, a bizarre green box that shouts “Revenge”, with a link to a site that lets you send “fake poo” to “anyone quickly and painlessly”, and another with a picture of the world’s most famous starlet that reads “be Marilyn Monroe for 15 minutes!”
Then there are the blank spaces, with ‘reserved’ signs over them for some future space filler. And on it goes.
Hard as it is to believe, the idea has caught on – companies have discovered advertising on the page gets them a lot of exposure for a very cheap price.
So far, Tew has sold more than 942,000 of the dots and at last count has just over 57,000 more left to go. You don’t need to be a math whiz or a university student to see that Tew’s already made an Alaskan mint out of such a simple idea.
"All the money's kind of sitting in a bank account," he explains. "I've treated myself to a car. I've only just passed my driving test so I've bought myself a little black mini."
Tew admits it’s been tough keeping up with both his studies and the demands of the site, but it’s worth the effort.
And it may have an unexpected bonus even he hadn’t considered – he’s been contacted by several Internet companies offering a job to the man who figured out an easy way to make money on the web.
"I didn't expect it to happen like that," he marvels. "To have the job offers and approaches from investors -- the whole thing is kind of surreal. I'm still in a state of disbelief."
You might say he’s not only pixilated but pixel-elated as well.
December 30, 2005
