[lit-ideas] Thinking outside the box

 
_http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051229/ts_nm/homepage_dc;_ylt=A86.I1psILVDTHQBSh
wDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl_ 
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051229/ts_nm/homepage_dc;_ylt=A86.I1psILVDTHQBShwDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNl
YwMlJVRPUCUl)  
LONDON (Reuters) - If you have an envious streak, you probably shouldn't read 
 this.  
Because chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a  small town in 
England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a  cool million 
dollars in four months on the Internet.
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. 
He had the brainstorm for his million dollar home page, called, logically  
enough, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, while lying in bed thinking out how he  
would pay for university. 
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. 
So far they have bought up 911,800 pixels. Tew's home page now looks like an  
online Times Square, festooned with a multi-colored confetti of ads. 
"All the money's kind of sitting in a bank account," Tew told Reuters from  
his home in Wiltshire, southwest England. "I've treated myself to a car. I've  
only just passed my driving test so I've bought myself a little black mini." 
The site features testimonials from advertisers, some of whom bought spots as 
 a lark, only to discover that they were receiving actual valuable Web hits 
for a  fraction of the cost of traditional Internet advertising. 
Meanwhile Tew has had to juggle running the site with his first term at  
university, where he is studying business. 
"It's been quite a difficulty trying to balance going to lectures and doing  
the site," he said. 
But he may not have to study for long. Job offers have been coming in from  
Internet companies impressed by a young man who managed to figure out an  
original way to make money online. 
"I didn't expect it to happen like that," Tew said. "To have the job offers  
and approaches from investors -- the whole thing is kind of surreal. I'm still 
 in a state of disbelief."

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