Million Dollar Home page

An end-of-year update to this internet phenomenon:

Remember Alex Tew? A brilliant UK University student who didn't want to graduate with a big student overdraft, so he set up a website with the aim of making a million. It's been a profitable few months since then. Alex created the website www.milliondollarhomepage.com - a website selling pixels for $1 each.

Advertisers buy pixels in $100, $500 and $5,000 blocks. They buy pixels to advertise their websites. Alex has sold 900,400 out of his 1,000,000 available pixels.

I watched this story break months ago and saw Alex's site back when he had sold only 200,000 pixels (only $200,000 - who am I kidding? - wow!). He has now sold 900,400 pixels and I am still wondering whether to buy one of the few available blocks. After all we all want traffic.

Yes, Alex's advertisers are getting traffic, but my guess is that 60% are search engines and some are pixel-curious procrastinators, with only a tiny proportion being 'targeted' traffic. Hmmm... maybe I would end up with more traffic but not much more business as a result. (I think I just talked myself out of buying again!)

At the last count there were 1,300 sites in Google linking to Alex's website. Well, now there's one more, thanks to this post.

(Keep up the good work Alex. As marketers we need reminding that a brilliant idea can turn into a runaway success. Watch this space!)