Advertisers and publishers who work with us have long asked that we complement our search and content-based text advertising with display advertising capabilities. DoubleClick gives Google the leading platform for display advertising, enabling us to rapidly bring advances to the market in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies.

As the combination of Google and DoubleClick delivers better, more relevant display ads, we're also looking forward to delivering an improved online experience to users. Because user trust is paramount to the success of our business, users will continue to benefit from our commitment to protecting user privacy following this acquisition. And our scale and infrastructure mean that users will also be spending less time waiting for web pages to load. Ultimately, we believe that by combining our advertising network with DoubleClick's display ad serving products, and by investing resources in the display ad business, we will be able to help publishers and advertisers generate more revenue. That in turn will fuel the creation of even more rich and diverse content for Internet users everywhere

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.