Normally, I don't go for these types of ads...but this one struck me as a little different.
This story begins with a chap known as Alex Tew who resides in the United Kingdom (see how I used the word "chap" quite appropriately, my creative writing teacher in college would be proud).
Anway, Mr. Tew needed money to pay for college, so he came up with a crazy idea, to split a web page into a million pieces and sell those pieces for a dollar ( I guess he thought if he used his native currency of Pounds that would not have as much appeal). He called his page the "Million Dollar Home Page" and started selling adspace. Sales were very slow for a while, but slowly here and there, people started buying these little tiles for a hundred bucks a piece. Once he had a few customers, he wrote up a press release, and let it out into the wild. The rest is history. After only a few months of web presence, after news stories, and tv interviews, the page actually sold out. In fact he sold the last 1000 pixels for appx $38,000 on Ebay. The interesting thing is that the page has become a bonafide advertisement aggregator and actually drives traffic to those that bought those little boxes.
I guess it was only a matter of time before someone figured out a way to do a similar site and then monetize it by way of viral/affiliate marketing. Essentially, much like Amazon.com pays webmasters commisions to place links to products for sale on their site, the folks at this site,
are paying people commisions on adspace that is sold through refferal.
This particular project, combines a lot of high tech ideas and marketing strategies and rolls it all up in to one. Enough to get me thinking that I want to tbe a part of it now before this thing snowballs into something incredibly huge...After all it's only 25 bucks, (not like the $100 that Mr. Tew was charging), what does one really have to loose? The tiny pixel that I bought has already sent considerable traffic to my long distance site.
Read and hear more about it, here.
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