The Million Dollar Homepage. Congratulations to Alex Tew, a 21-year-old British college freshman who made $155,000+ through his site in only a month's time. He was able to pay off three years of college tuition in the first month of attendance at college. Wish I had acted on the idea when I had it years ago.
When I first came online back in 98, the Web was in the process of becoming AOLified, and the collegiate snobs for which the Web had been something of a private playground were having fits. I know the Web was first made available to the military, other government agencies, and academia, but many of the academic types were snobby about "having" to share their sandbox with the Great AOL Unwashed.
Not knowing just what the rules were (I was part of the Great AOL Unwashed at the time, but I had no desire to look like one) I looked up Netiquette and found out that anything that seemed the least bit commercial was frowned upon, and usually resulted in flaming, and sometimes emailbombing. I wasn't interested in experiencing either, so I kept my idea to myself. Unfortunately, it seems I took too long. Not only has Alex Tew achieved 15% of his five-year goal within 30 days, but there are already dozens of copycat sites up, though most of them crow about their copycat status. (That page was posted almost two weeks ago, so the numbers there are a little off.)
I may still come up with some variant of the idea, but not for comedy value. I'd love to sit down and put it all together right now, but if I tried to go live with it now I'd have to use a free webhost, which means bandwidth problems, and I wouldn't be able to do a thing about it until next Thursday, 10/6, when the eagle flies again, hopefully without having its wings clipped again by the finance department like the last few times.
Lingering illness, lingering lingering-ness on the part of doctors I depended on to fill out paperwork so I could get paid while I was at home recuperating from the lingering illness, and some non-medical issues have depleted my finances to the point that, though I expect to get a nice fat check next Thursday, I'll be scraping the barrel until then. My car's registration expires on Saturday, but before I can do that I have to pay parking tickets that total almost as much as my last (skimpy) check. On Thursday I'll be like the guy who rolls up at the lottery office to pick up his multimillion-dollar winnings in raggedy clothes, in a car which ran out of gas just as he coasted into a parking space in front of the building, with a tow-truck tailing him because the car was in that bad shape. (Thankfully the car part isn't true in my case, though the car does need brakes and an oil-change, neither of which I have the funds for right now.)
Million Dollar Homepage. That coulda been me...
Bekel challenges Tew!
ReplyDeleteIn slipstream of all commotion around this complete new stunning kind of website, Bekel challenges Tew! After Alex Tew started to sell every pixel of his homepage, internet specialist Joost Bekel came up with an idea even more spectacular! Bekel said earlier he can do better than Tew and offers much more fun while raising money. He wants to raise $10.000/week from 1. November 2005 on. That's when he expects his newborn baby. Isn't that cute? So he divided the week into 10.000 little pieces: 1 minute each and offers every piece to the audience for 1 dollar!
Now Bekel has set his mind to beat Tew. Tew mentioned in his blog his expected income for September. "September is for Tew, October probably as well, but November will be my month!" Bekel is convinced his concept is even more genious than Tew's and offers more value to the visitor.
On the question if he needs really $10.000 for his kid Bekel answers: Does Alex Tew need $1.000.000 for his study? ;-)
The Chinese Million Dollar Homepage?????
ReplyDeletehttp://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ has been so successful that it catches eyes of not only English speakers but also people of other nations.
A Million Dollar Homepage in Chinese( http://www.1baiwan.com/ ) was launched last week, which grows so fast that it was listed on Alexa's Mover & Shakers (Chinese website) after only one week, whose traffic rank rise up by 4,000%. ( http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/movers_shakers?lang=zh_gb2312 )
Even Alexa noticed this Chinese "copycat", and mentioned its existence.( http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/movers_shakers?lang=en )
The Chinese Million Dollar Homepage is designed particularly for Chinese visitors and their block/grid (13x13 pixels) is also larger than the Million Dollar Homepage (10x10 pixels) as Chinese Characters are larger than English letters. On the other hand, the price is set for local market, RMB(Chinese Dollar)100 for each, each is a lot more affordable than US$100.
According to a Chinese blogger, the Chinese Million Dollar Homepage has been very hot among Chinese bloggers, and it's been also reported by several major professional Chinese ICPs. And the owners wrote on their blog that, the traffic had grown so fast that they had to purchase their own server only 5 days after it launched .
The Chinese Million Dollar Homepage also has an English ntroduction page( http://www.1baiwan.com/EngIntro.html ), which promotes itself as a cost-effective way of reaching Chinese market, in which 60 million people surf Internet. It accepts payment in US$ via Paypal and US$15 per block for people who are not able to pay RMB(Chinese Dollar).
But the Chinese culture is quite different from the Western culture, will it succeed as the English one? Let's see.