Alex Tew
Alex Tew (* 1984 in Wiltshire , United Kingdom ) was the first to come up with the idea of selling a website pixel by pixel in 2005 - initially for one US dollar per pixel . These websites are called "pixads" (English abbreviation for pixel advertisement ). Within five months this concept became a great success.
Million Dollar Homepage
The venture came about when the student was looking for a way to raise the money to study at the University of Nottingham . In exponential growth, caused by word of mouth and increasing media coverage, more and more customers advertised on Tew's The Million Dollar Homepage (an image map of 1000 × 1000 pixels) - mostly those who otherwise only appear as spammers . The number of visitors to the website also grew: According to Tews, at the turn of the year 2005/2006 there were 3.2 million in just two weeks.
Buyers of a pixel can set a graphic link to any URL . Every buyer is free to design the pixel blocks. The texts that appear when the mouse pointer is hovered over the images can also be formulated as desired by Tews customers. Tew went live on its website on August 26, 2005.
The last thousand pixels were sold at an eBay auction for $ 38,100. Fun bidders had temporarily driven the price to over $ 160,000. The Washington Post estimates that such a success story will be difficult to replicate on the Internet. According to media reports, there were over 200 imitators, but their projects were far less successful.
In July 2017, of the 2816 links, only 1780 were directly accessible. Of these, 547 links were no longer accessible and 489 had meanwhile been redirected to other websites or domain sales portals.
Other Projects
Tew's Pixelotto project was built on the same system, but a pixel costs $ 2 here. One dollar of this goes to Tew, the other dollar is paid into a jackpot. As soon as all 1 million pixels have been sold, the jackpot will be raffled off to any visitor, provided the visitor has previously clicked on an advertising link.
On September 23, 2010, Alex Tew announced another project via Twitter: One Million People . As with the One Million Dollar Homepage , a million people were able to secure a place here - this time in a book that shows the faces of those people and was intended to capture a moment in the history of the Internet. According to Tew, the internet is defined by people and is primarily a social platform. The project is no longer available.
Tew's later projects include the meditation homepage / app Calm .
Private life
A special hobby of Alex Tew is beatboxing . Before his success with the One Million Dollar homepage, he was a member of the beatbox group Drool Skool , consisting of the successful beatboxer Shlomo and the actor Burn Gorman , then known as BB Burn. His own beatboxing pseudonym was A-Plus. In addition to his work as a beatboxer, he also created the website HumanBeatbox.com .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Don Oldenburg: A Million To One - Chances Are Imitators Can't Match This Student's By-the-Pixel Web Sales Success Washington Post, January 11, 2006.
- ↑ netzeitung.de Last million pixels remain inexpensive ( Memento from January 14, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Harvard Library Innovation Lab: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact. July 21, 2017, accessed July 31, 2017 .
- ↑ The Million Dollar Boy. In: sueddeutsche.de . December 6, 2006, accessed December 24, 2014 .
- ↑ Tews tweet
- ↑ Jason Hesse: Alex Tew launches One Million People ( September 26, 2010 memento in the Internet Archive ), RealBusiness.co.uk (September 23, 2010)
- ↑ Calm
- ↑ Humanbeatbox Myspace Account
- ^ Zachary Crockett, "How the Million Dollar Homepage Kid Became the $ 250m App Man," theHUSTLE.co, May 12, 2018.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Tew, Alex |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British initiator of the "Million Dollar Homepage" |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1984 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Wiltshire , UK |