Million Dollar Home Page Is SOLD OUT

From the IndyStar

Man pitches pixels, makes a million

Look what Alex Tew did, and you get one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” flashes.

It’s so simple, so cheap, so mind-bogglingly lucrative that it took the 21-year-old student from small-town Wiltshire, England, not even five months to go from broke to millionaire.

Worried about paying his college tuition last August, Tew chanced upon one of those rare original moneymaking ideas: creating a Web page out of 1 million blank pixels. He then began selling those pinhead-size digital picture elements that make up a computer screen for a dollar apiece, or $100 per 10-by-10-pixel block, to advertisers who turn them into colorful tiny billboards and micro logos linked to their own Web sites.
At 1:42:28 p.m. EST Wednesday, Tew was able to post a “sold out” sign on the Million Dollar Homepage (www.milliondollarhomepage.com). The spiky-haired Brit put the last thousand pixels up for auction on eBay 10 days ago with a $1 starting bid for the lot. Tuesday’s bidding reached $152,300, putting him over the million-dollar mark.

“I’m half-expecting a last-minute flurry of bids. I think it is going to go higher,” says Tew, whose initial investment to set up the pixel page was about $100. “I never imagined things would get to the level that they have.”

Unsure initially that a single pixel would sell, Tew felt the idea had potential, so he aimed high. “I asked myself the question, ‘How could I become a millionaire?’ Twenty minutes later I had the answer,” he says. In the beginning, he reasoned, even 1 or 2 percent of a million dollars wouldn’t be bad.

Read it all…