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Last Year Alex Tew rose to .Com stardom with a simple idea to make one million dollars from a website.

His solution was simple, sell one million pixels for one dollar each and make a million dollars, and the rest is history.

His next venture www.pixelotto.com did not do so well :-(

I first became aware that Alex was looking at another idea when I saw him post on a freelancing site, obviously looking for some cheap offshore code for his next idea, which was of course top secret.

A few months later he did a very good job marketing his new site, he managed to create a lot of buzz in forums, popular blogs, news papers and even national television (UK), and many thought he was going to pull it off again.

This time Alex wanted something sustainable / repeatable that would continue generating revenue for years to come, the answer: pixelotto.com

Pixel Lotto intended to give users the chance to win a million dollars by splitting the two million dollars (pixels are twice the price of the million dollar homepage) profit with one lucky user. Registered users are limited to ten clicks per day, clicks made are registered so that a winner can be “pulled out of the hat”

Once the prize fund reached a million dollars is reached a winner is selected, or at the end of one year, whatever has been earned will be split (the latter of these two scenarios will be the reality).

It was clear that with all the marketing he had done, the idea would fly or bomb pretty well overnight. It was not like the million dollar homepage which grew out of nothing.

After a couple of weeks the site was reporting it had achieved £137,000 dollars in advertising, five months on and its currently up to $150,800

The idea completely failed, probably because:

  1. The idea is boring, million dollar homepage was fresh, this is a re-hack of that idea
  2. Clicking ten adverts a day for a year is really boring, it is far easier, and more fun to buy a lottery ticket, all be it pixel lotto is free to play
  3. Who wants click through’s from users that just hit your site and back out before moving onto the next click? (confirmed by this article, the author of which has a link from the Million Dollar Homepage)

Interestingly, the answer to question three is a load of other crappy get rich quick schemes:

AgLoco dot com the team that promise to put a nasty toolbar in your browser and promise to give “shares” in the company in return for clicking on their adds. Having invested much time cleaning such nasties off other peoples machines I cannot imagine why people are signing up for this, but can see why they would advertise on pixel lotto

my2pals dot com another quality site offering get rich schemes and “free shares”

I lost the will to look at any more sites, its tedious stuff. Some are not even available.

According to Alexa a lot of these sites have reasonable traffic, pixel lotto itself has a decent ranking, perhaps running Adsense and splitting that with users would have been a better idea, though I’m sure that’s been tried before :-)

So that’s it, a damp squib of an idea which will be lucky to achieve 10% of its first milestone target before dying.

I’m sure Alex will bounce back with something else, he certainly has a talent for marketing, he just needs to market something with a bit more substance.

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    8 Comments

    Comment by Mr G

    What marketing talent has he got??? What marketing has he done since Pixelotto was launched. (Very little)
    A few PR stunts and a media friendly story might make you a million bucks but it doesn’t make you a marketing genius.
    Pixelotto is a flop masterminded by Alex who has done next to nothing to try and salvage the project.

    Many advertisers are unhappy with this lazy effort and some even want their money-back. While I don’t beleive that they are entitled to a refund. I do think Alex could be doing more to market the concept and if he can’t he should hire a marketing professional who can.

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    Comment by SiteLogic

    I think you have a point, when Million Dollar hopmepage started catching on he was approached by a marketing consultant who did a lot for him.

    I assume he had similar assistance with Pixe Lotto.

    So, perhaps he just got lucky with one idea that caught peoples imagination and will never do it again, have to wait and see.

    I always thought Pixel Lotto was a flawed idea, I dont think it is possible to turn it around however much effort he puts in.

    As for advertisers, they took a gamble on the site and it didnt pay off simple as that. If they had waited a few weeks they would have seen it wasnt working, but then if it had worked they would have missed out.

    I think this marks the end of Pixel selling….

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    [...] now I am asking who will the advertisers be? I recently wrote a post on Pixel Lotto and how this idea bombed. If you don’t know, pixel lotto was the successor to the million [...]

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    [...] Ok so his new venture Pixel Lotto hasn’t done so well, people in the media are starting to slag off his second attempt at a killing. He also mentioned this eBook he was writing but nope, nothing, if [...]

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    [...] time ago I wrote a post on Pixel Lotto and why I thought it had not [...]

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    [...] Visit SiteLogic.co.uk for for more reading and an update and on pixel lotto. [...]

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    Comment by Deano

    Where’s a country where media access is well controlled and will nicely provide you a backdoor for not having to cough up 150k.

    Kenya Africa off course

    So which police station in UK did u use to validate the draw!

    Where’s the pic showing that on your website.

    You will be in the news again my son, and not for the reasons you would like this time.

    Jail for fraud is a good one……

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    Comment by SiteLogic

    Yeah I saw the winner was Kenyan and thought that must be a hell of a lot of money in that country… I mean its not pocket change here… I did not think there was anything dodgy about it…. what makes you think its rigged?

     
     

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