The Million Dollar Homepage

Play dress up and disguise an old idea, then people will buy it for $1 million dollar.

By now, I'm pretty sure that everyone has heard of Alex Tew or at least heard of the million dollar homepage where a 21 year old college student became a millionaire by selling 1 million tiny pixels for $1 dollar each (customers must purchase a minimum of 100 pixels). What's more impressive about all this is that he sold every single piece of pixels within a matter of approximately 4 months, thus making him an almost instant millionaire. He has surely hit the jackpot, but how did he do it? Well if you take a look at his site you'll see that it's nothing more then just a simple one page site, with tons of ads on it all stuck together. Take a look:


So how did this guy manage to turn a one page website into a million dollar web page? Well you may notice and realize that these things are nothing more then just ads. He's basically selling off ads at a very high price of $100 worth of pixels at a time. The idea of selling off your web space for advertisement has been done plenty of time in the past, but no one seems to overcharge customers at a high price.... Essentially $100 will buy you a little clickable square on his homepage where you can display anything you like, but in order to display a banner, it'll cost you thousands of dollars.
If Alex Tew were to directly declare that he is selling space on his site for the displaying of ads, he would be no where near successful because it has been done before and potential customers will not be interested nor will they even be curious enough to enter his site. Yet, if he claim that users are actually buying pixels then it will definitely sell.

He disguised the selling of space for ads, by referring to them as pixels and getting people to make a big deal out of it.

If anything, Alex Tew just proved to me (and probably the rest of the internet world) that if you take any existing idea and sell it as something else (you have to be clever), people will actually buy it because they think its something new.

So who will be next in line to come up with such a clever and ingenious idea ?