Alex Tew Earns a Million Selling Pixels January 1, 2006
News.com reports that Alex Tew, the innovative kid who launched the Million Dollar Homepage as a bid to raise money for college has definitely succeeded. Tew sells one million pixels on the site at a $1 per pixel. He is rapidly closing in on his $1 million dollar goal. He has sold 999,000 pixels and has placed the last 1,000 pixels for bid on eBay.
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 square of 10-by-10 pixels, roughly the size of a letter of type, costs $100.
He sold a few to his brothers and some friends. When he had made $1,000, he issued a press release that was picked up by the news media and spread around the Internet.
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 multicolored confetti of ads.
There are many sites trying to duplicate Tew's success but they probably lack the large amount of press Tew has been able to generate by first coming up with the idea of selling pixels.
News.com 
