Well, a U.K.-based web designer has found a way to make money through Internet advertising, but without banner ads, text links or video ads that fill a screen.
Entrepreneur Alex Tew is selling the simplest graphical denominator of a computer screen: the pixel.
Tew’s MillionDollarHomePage.com is filled up, with hundreds of ads — some are as small as a 100-pixel square — that hawk everything from ringtones to dating ads to casino action.
It may be hard for advertisers to stand out amid a busy screen but, so far, Tew has found a way garner attention through an idea that is simple to understand and cheap to set up.
MillionDollarHomePage.com is your basic home page, divided into 10,000 small squares of 100 pixels each. Tew sells the pixels for $1 a piece.
The result is a cluttered billboard of advertisements in various shapes and colors.
Tew in his first two weeks sold $40,000 in ads; as of Monday he has sold more than $300,000.
Since its launch, the site has received a total of about 1.5 million unique visitors. It even has landed on the “Movers & Shakers” feature of Alexa.com, which ranks the world’s websites by the number of people who visit them. At one point Tew’s site reached Alexa’s No. 2 spot.
Some advertisers are elated. DS Laboratories, for example, purchased 800 pixels. Almost overnight, traffic surged at the company’s website by twentyfold, and all of the increase came from MillionDollarHomePage.com.
Tew pledged to keep the site up for at least five years and to close the page when his goal of one million dollars was reached. “I had to think big,” he says.
