Big ad companies make their best to sell the available ad space on their websites. Last year Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from Cricklade, Wiltshire,England came up with the idea of selling pixels as ad space for $1 per pixel. The media and the entire world soon found out about this revolutionary idea that had previously been brought to life by this young man. Famous, including Orange and The Times, or less well known brands bought ad space on this web site.

Everything started with Alex experiencing a lack of money. His first thought was to raise money for his studies at the University of Nottingham. The domain name sparked his creativity and he immediately put on paper the features the site needed. He bought the domain name for £50. After designing the site himself, which was just a blank page, he invested $1,000 in a press release. The traffic increased and more and more advertisers were persuaded to trust his idea.

The webpage is working on a basic principle: an interested person buys a pixel block (minimum a 100 pixels square – 10 x 10 pixels for $100) and can design an image (a logo or a slogan) to be displayed and can choose a URL which links to another site.

The main purpose was to sell all the pixels for one million dollars of income for Alex Tew. The last 1,000 free pixels of advertisement space have been sold on e-bay virtual auction site for $38,100. Thus Millionar Dollar Page accomplished its mission and brought its owner the long time dreamed $1 million dollars.

Alex believes his hugely successful enterprise owes its snowballing development to the power of word of mouth and the unusual story of a student making a million dollars by himself and just a few self-promoting activities. He has got a positive attitude as far as risk and failure and considers the latter a part of the learning process. By the way what the business management degree course could teach him now…?

He is convinced that “It’s to do with having faith in your subconscious mind” in other words trust your intuition.

Alex Tew is somehow an artist on the internet as his vision includes, besides a long term strategy about e-commerce, an artistic side. He considers his revolutionary approach to ads a piece of art that reflects both the present and what is possible in this branch.

With $1 million in his bank account and more money to come from now on Alex launched a new similar site, in December 2006, called Pixelotto this time a pixel being $2 rather than $1. There is little difference between the original Million Dollar Page and the newly launched site. This one too is basically just a one page staging area that offers pixel advertisements but this time the success seems to be more difficult to achieve. Some think this time is not so lucrative because Alex is not spending enough advertising this site or simply because the idea is simply boring now when so many copycat sites pop up every day.

Considered by some a marketing genius and by others simply a lucky young man who developed a unique idea and took advantage of the novelty of his approach, Alex Tew helped many advertisers or advertisement consumers to redefine their attitude towards the internet as a virtually limitless space of making money and at the same time spending money for lucrative purposes.

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