The Million Dollar Kid

It isn’t a professional way to approach an interview, but before I meet Alex Tew I remind myself that I mustn’t like him. He is the 22-year-old who took the world wide web by storm last year with his Million Dollar Homepage. This simple idea, which saw Tew selling tiny slices of advertising space on a site that everyone suddenly wanted to visit, made him more than $1-million in less than four months. He is clever, modest, funny, rich and single. See? Loathsome.

It is a measure of Tew’s generosity of spirit that he invites me to meet again to discuss his new big idea, something that could make him another $1-million every few months. And it is an idea that could see the Million Dollar Kid make lots of other people millionaires, too, while making hefty donations to charity.

To explain how it works, we must go back to August last year when Tew came up with his first big idea. He was 21 and had been avoiding college for three years before landing a place at Nottingham University.

“My accommodation and fees for the first term were £7 000 and I realised I was going to be broke,” he says. “I don’t know why, but from the age of eight all I’ve ever wanted to be is an entrepreneur. I sit in bed at night brainstorming — that’s when I get my best ideas. So on this night I wrote down, ‘How can I become a millionaire before I go to university?’

“I wrote down the attributes that this idea would need: it had to be simple to understand and to set up, it had to attract a lot of media interest and it needed a good name. After I wrote them down, the idea just came to me. I would like to say it was more dramatic than that, but it wasn’t.”

The idea was the Million Dollar Homepage (Milliondollarhomepage.com). Tew set up a website on which he explained that he was a young Briton about to go to university who needed to raise money. He didn’t want charity so instead he was offering to sell one million pixels (the dots on a computer screen that make up images) on his web page at $1 each. There was a grid measuring 1 000 x 1 000 pixels which Tew offered to sell in minimum-size blocks of 100. Advertisers were invited to buy them and post their logos on the space. When visitors clicked on a logo, they would be whisked to the advertiser’s own homepage.

A press release sent out by Tew was picked up by the BBC and then news of his novel idea went “viral” over the internet. The more people heard about the site and visited it, the more advertisers wanted to buy pixels.

“Last November, my elder brother Mike [he has three] and I were asked to go over to the States, and there I was doing interviews with people like ABC news radio and then Reuters TV in Times Square,” says Tew.

By December 31, he had sold 850 000 pixels. Then the Reuters interview was broadcast and Tew began to receive orders for 100 000 pixels every hour. He held back the last 1 000 dots to be auctioned on eBay. After 10 days of bidding, one advertiser bought them for $38 100. And then the Russian mafia struck.

“I was about to announce the winner in a big fanfare when we received an email threatening to bring down the website unless I paid $50 000,” he recalls. “I spoke to the web host in the US but we agreed we couldn’t really do anything, so we waited.”

The email was as clear as it was ungrammatical and threatened a “distribute denial of service” (DDOS) attack. This involves the hijacking of tens of thousands of computers worldwide in order to demand information from a victim’s site, an attack that causes the site to crash.

It read, verbatim: “hello u website is under us atack. to stop the ddos send us 50 000$ (it is just 5% 🙂 ) if u pay we do not ddos u site ever again! and u hava a nice life 🙂 if u do not pay — u site NEVER came online — again this ddos is not potect — u have BIG problem with u sponsors. u must answer TODAY. if u pay u site came online immediately.”

The site did, indeed, crash and the British police and the FBI began investigating while an American computer security company, DDOS Protection, sorted out his problems in return for a mention in the by now huge Alex Tew media carnival. The advertiser got his pixels and Tew finally stopped selling after making $1 037 100. (The attackers were thought to be Russian organised criminals, but were never traced.)

Tew was now so busy that he asked Nottingham University if he could defer his course until the following year, but in August of this year he decided there was no point going back. “I found I had already learned as much about business as I was ever going to learn at uni, and I had money behind me and lots of new ideas,” he says.

So, what is it like to find yourself rich at 22? Tew hasn’t gone wild. He says there have been a few parties — and at Christmas he got drunk and bought everyone a drink in the student bar — but on the whole he has been sensible. He bought a Mini and a small flat not far from his parents’ home near Cirencester, in Gloucestershire. And that is about it as far as spending goes.

Instead, Tew has been preparing for big idea number two, Pixelotto (Pixelotto.com), which was launched last week. “After the success of the Million Dollar Homepage, I felt great pressure to come up with another unique idea,” he says. “But even after the Homepage closed for sales, I was getting lots and lots of requests to buy more pixels, so I figured it still had some mileage in it.”

The new idea still involves one million pixels for sale on a page, but now every time a visitor clicks on an advert they will automatically be entered into a free prize draw. Visitors can click on the page up to 10 times a day. This time, the pixels will cost advertisers $2. When they are all sold, one of the ads will be randomly chosen and the names of all the people who clicked on it will go into the prize draw.

The winner, again randomly chosen by computer, will receive $1-million, plus $100 000 to donate to a charity of their choice. And Tew keeps the remaining $900 000. “There is a much bigger incentive this time for people to advertise because visitors won’t just be looking at the site — they will be clicking on the adverts in order to be entered into the prize draw,” he says. “This is legal in the UK because it isn’t gambling and it isn’t a competition. It’s no different from buying a packet of crisps that invites you to enter a free prize draw ‘with no purchase necessary’.”

Last week Tew invited some of the Million Dollar Homepage advertisers to be the first to buy and the money is flooding in. Within hours, he texted me to say “57K orders in already!”

One of those rushing to buy is Tim Strudwick, a director of The Floatworks in south London, which provides flotation tanks in which you can enter a state of deep relaxation. “We bought 800 pixels on the Million Dollar Homepage and it was great for us,” says Strudwick. “It doubled the traffic on our website. We’ve spent the same this time and we think we’ll get even more traffic.

“The touch of genius in this is the way he doesn’t charge visitors to the site for entering the prize draw. With all the problems lately over internet gaming, particularly in the US, not charging simply bypasses all the gaming laws. It’s very clever.”

Back at Nottingham University’s Institute for Entrepreneurial Innovation, they are proud of Tew. When Professor Martin Binks, the director, hears about Tew’s latest wheeze, he bursts out laughing. “What a brilliant idea!” he says. “It’s so simple. This is a lovely way of tying the Million Dollar Homepage, the advertisers and the visitors together even more tightly. I’m surprised he’s only charging $2 a pixel.

“Still” — and here you really can’t disagree with Binks — “$900,000 is better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick”. — Â