How selling pixels may yield a million bucks:

How selling pixels may yield a million bucks

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

By Gwendolyn Bounds, The Wall Street Journal

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.

The notion seemed absurd. Who would want to advertise on an unknown site that had no target audience, no track record of attracting visitors or even the slightest brand recognition?

But as with many gimmicks, its newness gave it legs, as did Mr. Tew's shrewd marketing. He first roped his friends and family into buying pixels and placing ads to make the page seem legitimate. He then began touting his site, and himself, to bloggers, who wrote about his crazy idea and linked to the site, which directed traffic his way. The media in Britain picked up on his efforts, fueling more visitors.

Within two weeks of the site's Aug. 26 launch Mr. Tew says he sold $40,000 in ads. More important, the traffic numbers started gaining attention among the U.S. Internet community.

Since its launch, the site has received a total of about 1.5 million unique visitors. In mid-September, it landed on the "Movers & Shakers" feature of Alexa.com, which ranks the world's Web sites by the number of people who visit them. Marketing executives often troll Alexa.com, which is owned by Amazon.com, to check out what's hot and what's not, and at one point Mr. Tew's site reached Alexa's No. 2 spot.

Currently, the site gets 600,000 to 700,000 unique visitors a month. As of Monday evening, Mr. Tew said he was $623,800 toward his goal, more than enough to pay for college and earmark some cash for his next entrepreneurial venture, he says. (He keeps a running tally of his sales on the Web site, and though the figure can't be independently verified, screenshots emailed by Mr. Tew of his PayPal and other checkout accounts appear to support his claim.)

While there's also no way of knowing for sure whether Mr. Tew is the first entrepreneur to sell pixels, the idea was new enough that it felt that way to onlookers.

"I was like, 'What's this?' " says Daniel Khesin, vice president of marketing at DS Laboratories Inc., a skin-care company in Lake Success, N.Y. After examining Mr. Tew's site, he says: "There was nothing inherently special about the page, but it was very obvious to us that at the very least, buying some pixels would be a good idea for the sheer number of visitors he was getting."

DS Laboratories purchased 800 pixels. Almost overnight, he says, traffic surged at the company's Web site by twentyfold, and all of the increase came from milliondollarhomepage.com. More impressive, he says, sales by Internet companies that DS Laboratories' site links to jumped almost 50 percent within a week of the ad going up.

"Our skepticism was that this is untargeted traffic," Mr. Khesin says. "But this advertising has definitely paid for itself many times forward. And unlike banner advertising where it goes away, people will always know where to find it to go back and purchase more products."

Similarly, Chris Magras, president Evisions Marketing Inc. in Tempe, Ariz., which helps Web sites get higher rankings on search services, also noted milliondollarhomepage.com's movement on Alexa.com. "Some people would say it's a bad idea, some would say it's a good one. All I know is that it was generating interest," Mr. Magras says.

Evisions bought 6,400 pixels and its ad went up on a Friday. The following Monday morning, Evisions was getting 2,000 more unique visitors to its home page, all linked directly from milliondollarhomepage.com. The number of leads, or visitors filling out personal information on the Evisions site, jumped to 300 a day from 100.

"It was quality traffic," Mr. Magras says. "It was definitely the biggest payoff for a one-stop ad buy we've ever had." He adds that the company is still getting 800 to 1,000 new visitors daily from Mr. Tew's site.

Copycats popped up almost immediately; now there are hundreds of Web sites selling pixels, some of them directly crediting Mr. Tew -- and even linking to his site. Some advertisers have put out press releases touting their alliances with Mr. Tew's site, further helping spike his traffic.

The risk, of course, is that as the original pixel concept gets mimicked, it will suffer from brand dilution and become a less compelling a business model. What's more, as milliondollarhomepage.com has filled up, it's become harder for advertisers to stand out amid a busy screen with messages ranging from "CasinoScams" and "Free Ringtones" to "Jesus" and "Hypnosis"; the smallest ad spaces, at 100-pixels square, are nearly indecipherable at this point.

Whether Mr. Tew reaches a million dollars remains to be seen. He readily notes that he'd never do another site like the original. Now, he says, "the copycats are all competing with each other."

One is Moneypants.com, a personal finance Web site geared toward women that says it has 600 members and has collected $4,500 over the last few weeks from its own pixel "Dream Page" -- a decent chunk of change for a nascent enterprise.

"It's very compelling," says MoneyPants Chief Executive Komal Bhojwani. "We don't have to end up going the investor route, which might require us to make changes to the business that we don't want to make. And we didn't have to get into debt by borrowing from a bank. We are generating revenue and not expenses."

One advertiser, Cherryl Weaver, says she's seen a 13 percent jump in traffic to her real estate Web site, www.hotlaneighborhoods.com, from the 1,500 MoneyPants.com pixels she bought. "As long as it's a strategic alliance, it makes sense," Ms. Weaver says, alluding to the affinity between a personal-finance site and real estate. "Would I team up with McDonald's if they did a dream page? No."

Meantime, James Thomson, a Web designer in Branson, Mo., says he's wiped out $30,000 in personal debt accumulated after the dot-come bust with his site, www.millionpennyhomepage.com, by selling pixels by the penny, instead of the dollar. Monday, he had only $974 left to go before reaching his goal of $10,000.

And Christian Abad, president of Accessible Computing Inc. in Charlotte, N.C., is trying to lure new clients to his pixel page, called www.pixelads4all.com, by giving them a 50 percent discount off their pixel purchases. Sales have been slow, but he remains optimistic about the overall concept and has even purchased 11 domain names in anticipation of a future in pixel advertising. Among them: pixelads4shopping.com and pixelads4porn.com.

For his part, Mr. Tew says he wants to keep milliondollarhomepage.com online "forever." If and when a million pixels are sold, he says he'll leave the page frozen in time, no changes allowed, no new buyers permitted. His ultimate goal is as lofty as the original concept: He hopes his site will be like a time capsule showing "what's possible on the Internet" -- an iconic image that he imagines "one day might be a piece of art in a museum."