The Million Dollar Homepage

Success Story of the Decade!

In 2006, a university student in the UK set up a website selling pixels. The reason for this was that he was looking to make a little extra cash to help him fund his living costs whilst living on campus. As one pixel is too small to see, he decided to sell them in blocks of 10 x 10 for $1 each which means for each block he sold he wound generate $100 gross profit. When a company bought a block, the pixels would show the company logo which linked to the company website. 


The first sale was made just three days after the website was set up to a music company on the web. After two weeks, 4,700 pixels had been sold and after generating his first $1,000 worth of revenue, the BBC heard about the site and it suddenly became a global phenomenon. The creator designed the site to hold a block of pixel measuring 1,000 x 1,000 so that once all of the pixels had been sold, he would have earned $1,000,000. Ambitious, I know. Over time more and more pixels were sold and within just a few months, there were just 1,000 pixels left. The creator decided the most fair way to sell these pixels was on E-bay, in my opinion I think he knew he would generate more revenue that way. Many bids were made, even as high as $170,000, but these bids were not legitimate as the people were not serious. The eventual bid winner was of a value of $38,100 which meant that the total gross income from the site was $1,037,100. The name of the creator? Alex Tew. 


Many of the pixel purchasers were well known companies including Wal-Mart, The Times, Tenacious D and Orange. 


The moral of this success story? - making serious money online can be done, just be ambitious, aim high and put in the work.