Many thanks to another Jeremy (again), a classmate and friend, for telling me about the existence of Alex Tew, a 22-year old Internet business models prodigy.

Alex Tew’s story tells a lot on the monetization potential of the Internet. About a year ago, a British citizen named Alex Tew started looking for an idea to finance his business studies.

It took him a few weeks (+ about an hour to hack the adequate code) to come up with MillionDollarHomePage.com, a website that generated Alex one million dollar revenues. The concept is really simple: there’s a million pixel on the page, and each pixel costs one buck. So, you may buy the pixels you like online. Now that the million pixels are sold out, Alex has made his first million! Enough to finance his studies and a couple beers with his friends I guess.

Now that he made it (don’t worry if you plan to launch your own pixel homepage too: many tried, few succeeded), Alex probably felt he needed to prove it wasn’t just luck but also flair, excellence in execution, tremendous buzz marketing skills and probably genius. So Alex Tew’s repeating the gamble and just launched PixeLotto.com. The business model is a little more complex, since not only Alex will make 2 million dollars, he’ll also make someone actually win 1 million. In other words, Alex will redistribute half of the website revenues. The question that is obviously raising in your brains is: “where do the 2 millions come from?”. Basically, Alex has doubled the price to 2$/pixel this time. Once the page will be full, visitors will be invited to click (max. 10 clicks per day) on PixeLotto for one month. After this period, one ad will be chosen, as well as one person who would’ve clicked on the ad. This visitor will hence win the lotto and instantly make 1 million bucks. Isn’t life beautiful? Of course, Alex, who launched PixeLotto on November 30th 2006, benefits from an extensive viral effect urging wide press & blog coverage. Alex claims he has already made $100,000+ in a few days.

MillionDollarHomePage.com & PixeLotto.com come to confirm a theory saying that the most simple and profitable business models may derive from the Internet.

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