Man Hopes To Make $1Million Selling Pixels. Yes PIXELS

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How Selling Pixels May Yield a Million Bucks
November 22, 2005; Page B1

It was just a few months ago that 21-year-old Alex Tew of Great Britain was stumped about how to pay for college. He'd filled a notebook with ideas before jotting down this simple, if rather audacious, query to himself: How Can I Become a Millionaire?

In the annals of entrepreneurship, what followed is an instructional tale of how a brainstorm, coupled with the Internet's powerful word-of-mouth culture, can set a trend in motion with lightning speed. Mr. Tew says his strategy was to find an idea simple to understand and cheap to set up, with a catchy name that would garner attention online, where he gained experience from having free-lanced as a Web designer for a few years.

Ultimately, his solution amounted to making money via Internet advertising -- but with a twist. Instead of selling banner ads, text links or splashy videolike ads that fill a screen, Mr. Tew opted to hawk the simplest graphical denominator of a computer screen: the pixel. A pixel is a tiny dot of light and color, and each screen has tens of thousands of them.

Mr. Tew created a home page, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, where he divided the screen into 10,000 small squares of 100 pixels each. His plan: to sell the pixels for $1 a piece, with a minimum order of 100 pixels. In each space, buyers could put a graphical ad of their choosing that links to their own site when clicked on. The end result is a cluttered collage of ads in various shapes and colors all amassed on a single digital billboard. (Mr. Tew doesn't charge his advertisers anything when a visitor clicks on the ads.)

Mr. 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.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113261806930503580-6ouqX6NSpgTBkHu4ln_7CpHXbBk_20061122.html?mod=blogs

Too many counterfeit "bits(tm)"... Seems like everyone is
making them these days.

I think I'll go for a copyright on a "color".

Good luck to him.

No shit. You can patent the color of your logging truck, if you have a logging truck and it's a unique color.

Go to http://www.capitolholidaytree2003.org/diary_1120d2.htm and scroll down almost all the way. The color on the side of this truck is patented. (And the guy in the red coat standing in front of it is about to get his ass drummed out of the GOP for being a decent human being.)

Golden Palace being American-owned. Lenovo being Chinese-owned.

(so much for the Chinese hating us...)

his site is filling up

Why can't I think up something like this!

would be the people who were stupid enough to pay a C-note for 100 stupid pixels on his stupid web page.

Fools and their money...

Redstone

Google will penalize his site. Not worth going into a long explanation of why, but the upshot is: What he's doing is exactly what triggers alarm bells with Google, and usually gets a site banned from the search engine.

Of course, with enough publicity, he won't need Google.

On the other hand, if his site is banned from Google, any site linking to his will get a lower PageRank as well.

On the other hand, if he makes his million, he won't care. But the other webmasters might.