Set Higher Standards by YogiRavi

The ideas was simple, charge advertisers $1 for each pixel on a single million-pixel page . The value proposition was equally simple, be part of internet history, Who could possibly pass that up?

The page was started in August 2005, and quickly sold out, netting the creator (Alex, a 21 year old student at the time) a boatload of cash. To get the ball rolling, Alex and his family bought the first few blocks of ad space. Once he had earned $1000, he wrote a press release that went viral instantly. Traffic to the site soared after the BBC started writing about the site. 300,000 pixels were sold in the first month alone. The advertisers (and of course Alex) all benefited immensely.

Start up costs? Probably zero or close it, just time invested to design the site and handle the customer transactions. Web Hosting and domain name would costs a little. Not sure if Alex did a deal with the web hosting company to place their logo on the site. If so, this cost would be taken care of.

This graph shows daily reach per million compared with a Om Malik’s popular weblog. The traffic peaked for about 4 months, but even today has a material number of hits (just under half the reach of Om’s blog in the past few months). Not bad. Wonder if Alex will be starting a 10 million pixel page anytime soon?

Some may look at kids making so-called “easy money” on the web and just bicker and moan. I on the other hand, look at this as a perfect of example of someone getting compensated for following through on a creative idea. Way to go Alex!