Thursday, December 29, 2005

World simultaneously wonders, "Why didn't I think of that?"

A 21-year-old guy in the UK has figured out a way to pay for college (and then some) with an internet marketing scheme:
Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page...

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.
He's sold more than 911,000 pixels so far, bought himself a car, and is getting job offers from internet companies. Good for him.

You can check out his website, called "The Million Dollar Homepage" here. It's a bit...busy, you might say.

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