Student makes £43,000 online by selling space on his web page
Howard Lake | 22 September 2005 | News
A college student from Wiltshire has generated £43,000 for himself simply by creating a web page and selling space on it to advertisers. While his site won’t fulfil its optimistic title of The Million Dollar Homepage, he has demonstrated that creativity and chutzpah can still generate funds online. Now, why didn’t a charity try this out first?
Alex Tew, 21, of Cricklade, Wiltshire, set up the Million Dollar Homepage to help fund his study at Nottingham University, starting next month. He divided his page into a grid of 10,000 boxes, each 100 pixels (10 by 10) in size. Companies and individuals can buy advertising space in blocks of 10 with a minimum purchase of $100.
Million Dollar Homepage
As well as the rapid accumulation of money, the website has secured considerable publicity from BBC News, Channel 4, The Guardian, and tech news site The Register.
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Tew has even added the first of a number of case studies showing that some of his advertisers are very happy indeed with the results of their adverts.
According to search metrics site Alexa, Milliondollarhomepage.com ranks third in its list of the top 10 ‘movers and shakers’, or websites that have moved up in the traffic rankings, as measured by the change in the number of users visiting the site.
If an entrepreneurial individual can make this amount of money for himself so quickly and for so little expenditure, what might a charity have achieved with the same idea?
- Million dollar homepage creator applies the idea to fundraising (13 January 2012)
- Ethical advertising pixel ads site aims to raise £1 million for charity (13 February 2007)
- Tate’s Buy a Brushstroke pixel ads campaign raises £550,000 (1 March 2007)
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.