ADDING GLAMOUR

Student cashes in $1 million web idea

London: If you have an envious streak, don't read this.

Because, chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a staggering $1 million with an idea on the Internet. Selling porn? Dealing in pharmaceuticals? Nope, all he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that make up all the pages on his home page. He had the brain-storm of the Million Dollar Home page, called, logically enough, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, while lying in bed thinking out how to earn money for university.

The idea: Turn his home page into a million pixels, go 10 pixels by 10 dots, and sell them for a dollar a dot (or square). Or rather, for a $100 for a logo. A 10 by 10 dot square, roughly the size of a stamp, is sold for $100.

He sold a few to his brothers and some friends, and when he had made $1,000, issued a press release.

That was picked up by the news media, which got him more sales, and soon advertisers for everything from dating services to a couple of estate agents to The Times of London were queuing up. Buy the 100 pixels, with links to their own sites.

The result: The Million Dollar home page now looks like a giant mosaic, each square festooned with a multi-coloured confetti of logos.

"All the money's kind of sitting in a bank account," Tew said from his home in Wiltshire, southwest England. "I've treated myself to a car. I'm just taking a break for a couple of days, so I've bought myself a little black Audi." He charges 40% commission from advertisers, some of whom wanted links to his site. He is trying to recover that they were receiving actually 60% of the money. He's trying to get the cost of traditional Internet advertising into perspective. He's not had to juggle running the site with his business degree course, in his home university where he is studying business.

He has already had a stroke of luck. Job offers have been coming in from sites like Craigslist, captivated by a young man who managed to figure out an innovative way to make money online. "I didn't expect it to happen this way," he said. "To have the job offers and approaches from investors... the whole thing is kind of surreal. I'm still in a state of disbelief." -Reuters

Abhi

• I had mentioned this earlier
• Visited this homepage today (One page website)
• Brilliant idea - which clicked (not all do).
• What can we learn from this idea?
• eg: on Global Recruiter, can we create a page, where we host logos of (say) 5000 TOP INDIAN job-advertising companies (colourful logos), with each logo, when clicked, takes the visitor to the homepage of that company's website? Each logo a hyperlink. Homepages of most jobsites do show 15/50 Logos of "Featured" Employers. But none has 5000 logos!
• Such a page could be hosted on "Jobseeker" side.

we have already accumulated names of 49300 companies (from 5/6 lakh job-advts).

you have to arrange these Co-Names in the "descending Order of the job-advts posted" so far.

Of course, then, we have to remove all those companies, which do not have own Websites.

We also have to remove those Companies which do not have logos!

[Signature and Date] 31/12/05

Abhi

What makes any job-portal look "glamorous"?

Practically every jobsite worth its name, flaunts (parades/displays) 2 things on its homepage:

#1 A huge list of names of job-advertisers - running into hundreds, at times. Each name clickable. When clicked all jobs of that company are neatly tabulated (short summary). In turn, in this tabulation, one can click on the "Position" and see the full advt.

#2 Logos & more colourful logos - maybe 20/30 logos. Each logo is also clickable. When clicked, it displays the same short-summary tabulation described above.

Only this morning, we talked about "Searching jobs by Company Name" - and you said we will incorporate it soon.

Of course, these features can be incorporated only in India Recruiter (neither on Global Recruiter nor on WWJ).

But we should do this, keeping in mind that the homepage must not look crowded/congested. This is the problem with Naukri - as also with Clickjobs.com (which I am right now surfing).

I am sure you will find a clever way to do this

• Incidentally, Clickjobs.com, on its homepage, has a button called "Live Help" - worth checking out.
• On Clickjobs.com, you cannot enter the job-code (available in Free Press yesterday) to see full job advt.

[Signature and Date] 06-12-05