There's money in them there pixels...
...but pixelpreneurs are having to reach further to maintain the novelty

London, 1 Mar 2006 | Money-for-nothing concepts abound with the launch of two new websites, each hoping to follow in the footsteps of 21-year-old entrepreneur Alex Tew, who made a mint selling pixels on his website back in December.

Alex, if you remember, made enough money to buy a brand new car and have an awful lot of change to spare. His project was originally designed to make him enough money to enable him to go to university; the project ended up so profitable that he's deferring entry while he thinks of other ways to extract lucre from the world wide web.

The message, then? There's money in them there pixels.

And riding on Mr Tew's coat-tails come two new 'pixelpreneurs' - UK-based BuyTheMap and HerMillionDollarPage, which operates from Connecticut.

The former, as a typically breathless press release explains, enables web users to buy a 'country' in a weekly auction on a popular auction website. Each week four countries go up for sale; the most expensive so far has been France, retailing at £100.

"The beauty is that the market sets the price a country is worth due to its Kudos, size and position," said the site creator. "So far I have had some interesting offers."

Tastelessly, Iraq is currently marked as 'occupied', with the flag of Great Britain painted across it.

The latter website is designed very much to appeal to the XX-chromosomed (mercifully the home page is not emblazoned with splashes of pink, but it does contain the usual stock images of 'aspirational' women along the header; one supposes that they are, in fact, models).

The HMDP head honchos explained: "HerMillionDollarPage.com, owned and operated by women, sees pixel advertising as more than a click- or sales-driving marketing method. It believes it’s an innovative way to raise awareness of and celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit of women."

But she added: "Who wants to repeat history? The recently launched HerMillionDollarPage.com intends to make its own. It aims to do it by building the world’s first pixel advertising page exclusively spotlighting women-owned businesses in the United States and around the world."

And there's the rub. These websites are a temporary phenomenon. Once their space is sold, it's sold. They rely on novelty, and once each novelty has worn off, the value is sure to recede. Alex Tew was the first to sell pixels; now, just to keep the interest up, the pixelpreneurs are being forced to specialise.

There's the additional problem of user-recognition. Such websites are only loosely targeted, others not at all. How many web users will head to HerMillionDollarPage to find businesses selling things for women, and not just out of curiosity to see how this whole pixel-advertising thing works?

While BuyTheMap seems to be doing some business, with countries apparently being sold, it's interesting to note that HerMillionDollarPage is, at the time of writing, totally blank.

Perhaps pixelpreneurship has already run its course.