British student's Web site nears $1 million in ad sales

When 21-year-old British student Alex Tew needed to raise money to pay for his university, he came up with an idea many might dismiss as wishful thinking: raise $1 million by selling 1 million pixels worth of advertising space on his Web site for $1 each.

Tew started off in August by pestering friends and relatives to buy 100-pixel blocks on his site, The Million Dollar Homepage (http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com,), but within weeks he was overwhelmed with orders and had to enlist help to process the requests for advertising space, according to his blog.

Tew's Web site is now close to reaching the $1-million goal, with 999,000 pixels already sold and the final 1,000 pixels of advertising space for sale in an eBay Inc. auction set to end later today. At the time this story was being written, the highest bid for the last 1,000 pixels on the Web site was $140,300, meaning Tew seems certain to clear his $1 million goal by a wide mark.

Ironically, now that Tew is close to meeting his goal, he has decided to defer his university studies, according to his blog.

After the last pixels are sold today, that's the end of this money-raising project, according to Tew's Web site. Advertisers will not be able to resell their pixels and no further pixels will be sold. The site itself will be maintained online for at least five years, it said.