J.C.’s Money Blog

We all know the big stories about the Internet giants, Google, Amazon, Craigslist, Facebook, YouTube. One or two guys start a website that dominates Internet traffic and becomes worth a billion dollars or so.

But there are plenty of other fascinating stories out there of other Internet Entrepreneurs who didn’t make billions, but they made big sums for creative ideas. My favorite Internet rags to riches story is about the English kid who made the Million Dollar Homepage.

The 21 year-old kid made over $1 million in about 5 months with a simple concept, he says he thought of in a twenty-minute brain storming session in bed, in a effort to make it through his university studies without any student loan debt. The idea was simple, he would create a basic site with 1,000 x 1,000 pixel square on the front page, and sell pixels to whomever would buy them for $1 each. The buyers had to buy a minimum block of 100 pixels, and they could choose the image, which would represent a hyperlink to a site of their choosing, as well as a tooltip with their custom message displayed whenever the user moused over their pixels. The site was to remain up for at least 5 years, and supposedly your purchase of pixels would be buying a piece of Internet history.Alex Tew was successful with this idea that required only a $100 initial investment of a domain name and web hosting space, because of the viral nature of the Internet. He didn’t really need to advertise, because the idea was so clever that it spread through bloggers and chat rooms, excited to see whether a kid could raise a million bucks like that.

You may wonder why anyone would buy a tiny ad in a sea of other ads on a page that contained pretty much nothing but ads. Well, it is actually a great way to get in on some cheap search engine optimization. Search engines like Google give popular sites like this a high page rank. This page rank is an indication of how many sites link to the site and this is weighted by the page rank of the linking sites.

Thus since the Million Dollar Homepage was getting so many links to it, its page rank went up. All links contained on the Million Dollar Homepage in turn increased the page rank of the sites that bought the pixels. So even if noone clicked on an ad directly off the Million Dollar Homepage, purchasers of the pixels should have gotten more traffic via higher rankings in search engine results.

Oh man I wish I would have thought of this idea first.