Brilliant!

You know those Guinness commercials with the 2 guys that say "Brilliant!" all the time? Yeah, I love those too. Especially the new ones with the limburger cheese hats, haha.

Anyway, I read an article yesterday about this kid in Great Britain who was struggling to find a way to pay for college (and of course, it was 1 month till he was supposed to start, nothing like waiting till the last minute). So, one night, lying awake, trying to think of some way to get the money, he had a stroke of guinness, ooops, genius. "What if I made a web page and sold the individual pixels on it for $1 each (1,000,000 pixels total)?" Now, why would anyone think that? It's silly, right?

Yeah, so silly that after 3 months he's just finished his first term in college with a paltry $936,700 (it was $912,000 when I read the article yesterday so while I was sleeping he made another $24,000) in his bank account. He started by putting up the site (side comment to balderdash: note correct use of site) on a Friday and then spent all weekend trying to convince his friends to tell their friends to find their rich friends to get them to buy squares from him. Minimum purchase was $100 or a 10x10 square (about the size of a pencil eraser). You get your image in that space with a link to your website or whatever. No adult links allowed though (or he would have made $1 million in about 20 minutes).

By Monday he had a friend of a friend of a friend purchase a 20x20 square for $400 and he was on his way. Over the next week and a half he made another $800. Then the press caught wind of what he was doing in the UK and wrote about it. The next day he sold $2,500 and then he was really off. By the time he left for school 3 weeks later he had about $40,000. He's been all over the US doing interviews for tv, radio and newspapers.

And that, my friends, is Brilliant!

Visit the Million Dollar Homepage

Be sure to read his blog, it tells the whole story. I think he said to date that there were 350 or so copycat websites (which is what I thought about doing immediately after reading it).

Have a million dollar weekend all.