Pixel Advertising: Created by College Students

Last fall, a new phenomenon was introduced in the advertising world. It is called pixel advertising. It began last fall when Alex Tew, a British college student, needed to find a way to pay for his college education. He came up with an idea. He created a website that sold advertisements on it for $1 per pixel. A pixel is a measurement on the computer screen of 1 millimeter by 1 millimeter, but the size also depends on the screen resolution. Word spread about Tew’s website called the Million Dollar Homepage. If you go to the website, the entire page is full of logos of different pixel sizes. When you click on one of the logos, it brings you directly to the advertiser’s website. To reach his million dollar goal, Pew auctioned the last 1,000 pixels on his site for $38,000 on ebay. The success of The Million Dollar Homepage has caused many others to create similar sites.

The latest news regarding pixel advertising comes from a trio of Miami-area college students. I found an article, “S. Florida entrepreneurs give pixel advertising a try,” which came from the Miami Herald online. The students, all finance majors who graduated from high school together in 2004, are up-and-coming entrepreneurs. They created a website called ownonlinerealestate.com, which is a 500,000 pixel map of the United States. The idea is that advertisers have to purchase a minimum of 10 pixels by 10 pixels over the geographical area they want to reach, therefore, the students are pitching it as destination driven.

Some industry professionals comment that they believe that Tew’s success was based on the fact that the website was “a novelty-driven fluke.” The flaw in his site is that it was basically a big billboard and nothing else. Kris Oser, who covers interactive advertising for Advertising Age stated, “I don’t know why you would want your ad crammed in there with everyone else.” She believes that the concept would probably work better on a website that already generates a lot of traffic, like a social network. On the plus side, pixel advertising has already proven that it is a real option for Internet marketing. Additionally, pixel advertising on the Internet is pretty inexpensive, so even if it is not that effective, not much money will be wasted.

I think the idea that college students are creating websites for advertisers is great. Tew started off with an idea and others have branched off of his idea by making it more organized in order to be more effective. The Florida college students formed a company called Globex and gathered up a couple hundred dollars to start up the site. Their endeavors prove that college students have the ability to come up with some great concepts, some which advertisers have not even thought of at this point. If college students who are not yet in the industry are generating successful marketing tactics now, I am eager to see what will be in store for the future of the advertising industry.