You may have heard the story of Alex Tew who created a website that sold advertising on a homepage that consisted purely of ads. It was made up of one million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid. Alex sold ad space at $1 for a 10 × 10 block.
In reality such a website is normally pointless for both advertisers and users. However, due to the uniqueness of the idea and how Alex pitched the website as a way for him to pay for attending university, it caught the attention of the media. He got worldwide news coverage and in just over 4 months all the pixels were sold and he had made over $1,000,000 US.
Pure Genius or pure luck?
Well despite this instant success, Alex has failed multiple times since…
- Pixelotto: Alex developed Pixelotto, a spin on the original Million Dollar Homepage idea, which failed to gain traction. People were given the chance to win $1 million by clicking the ads, but it failed to sell enough of the ad space to raise the prize money. It was received with criticism and described as a ‘tax on the stupid’.
- PopJam: Alex then tried to create a real online business called PopJam, a social media humor site for text chatting with strangers, which despite angel funding also failed and was closed down.
- SockandAwe: Third time unlucky, Alex created a game called Sock & Awe where you get to throw a shoe at George Bush. It’s purpose was to promote PopJam, and while it got excellent press coverage receiving over 4 million visitors in a matter of days (certainly an admirable achievement), it didn’t help get PopJam off the ground, did not make any money from advertising, ran up bandwidth expenses, and ultimately became such a distraction that Alex decided to quickly sell it for a measly £5000. While £5000 for a weeks work (minus expenses) is not bad, its a step back from the success of his original project which averaged somewhere around £5000 per day profit.
- OneMillionPeople: 5 years after his original success, Alex then went on to create OneMillionPeople which was very similar to Million Dollar Homepage, just instead of pixel ads, it was photos of people. The aim was to sell spots for $3 and generate $3 million in revenue. That idea was quickly showing failure and was abandoned for free listings and the early buyers were refunded. Since the site offers nothing of real value and the Alex Tew novelty has long worn off, the site will again fail to gain traction.
Why So Many Failures?
Alex certainly has the entrepreneurial spirit and is continuing to try new ideas, which we can certainly commend him for. However, he needs to get a bit more inventive with his ideas and re-spark and channel his ability to drum up press like he did with the MillionDollarHomepage and ShockandAwe.
Alex has missed the essentials with each of his follow-up businesses. Since the Million Dollar Homepage each business has either:
- Lacked a unique idea – Popjam was just ChatRoulette without the video, and Facebook chat but with strangers, and there is already plenty of chat rooms for chatting with strangers. Pixelotto & One Million Pages were just poop reinventions of the Million Dollar Homepage (I meant to write poor, but poop is a much better way to describe them).
- Lacked a way to make money – Popjam didn’t really have any special ways of making money, nor could it be forseen too without a major change. While garnering mainstream use will eventually bring lots of money (think Twitter or Myspace), chatting with strangers was never destined to go mainstream. Facebook has become so successful at generating revenue because it gathers so much data from users which advertisers can use for precision targeted advertising campaigns. Popjam, even if it got off the ground, was never destined to make money. SockandAwe was also not monetized and missed out on some chunky advertising revenue, if it had managed just to secure a few banners totaling $5 eCPM then it would have generated at least $25,000 in that first week, and its sale price would have been considerably higher. It could have also been made to build an email list which would have been very valuable for promoting PopJam, or any future projects.
- Lacked longevity – The Million Dollar Homepage, Pixelotto and One Million Faces all lacked longevity. Once all spots are gone, the business is over and you have to start all over. Gaining traction is not an option, and it is no surprise Alex has just lost so much traction by trying to reinvent his original idea twice over.
- Lacked value for users - With the exception of PopJam all of Alex’s projects have lacked a true value for the end user, relieing on novelty, and as Alex has learned, novelty wears off fast.
Hopefully Alex has learned some valuable lessons through all of this, won’t die out a forgotten child star and has something worthwhile on the horizon. Or maybe he will burn through all his cash and end up back where he started.
He certainly has a talent for creating press and a good entrepreneurial spirit. He could just do with fine tuning it.
I was just discussing Alex and his ventures the other day… although he”s failed to create a business as of yet I have no doubt he”ll eventually succeed! He seems to be going for quick wins instead of as you say providing lasting value. I”m rooting for him!
What”s wrong with failure?
Edison took 1000 attempts as did Harland David Sanders aka KFC founder – see http://scottsbarlow.tumblr.com/post/2553531590/failed-entrepreneurs-who-failed-first-3
Too many blog posts and stories about how people have failed. You do raise some good business pointers in what went wrong but this post is packaged too much in “fail” (title of the blog)
I am constantly refreshed by Alex”s attempts at business and once received a tweet reply from Alex where he quoted Winston Churchill’s “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never–in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense”.
Whether Alex had a big bag of luck in his first venture or not i know for sure one thing that really matters, that failing isn”t the end of the world.
Alex has energy, passion, vision, persistence and sheer determination – and that can only bring success to him again.
“Success is the man who can build a solid foundation with the bricks thrown at him by mockers”
I completely agree with what you are saying about failure – making mistakes is part of being an entrepreneur.
However, it is only really failure if you give in or fail to learn from your mistakes. Alex doesn”t appear to be learning from his mistakes so far.
This post is an open letter to Alex to learn from his mistakes, and for others to learn from them too.
I completely agree
Edison put the best swing on things. As this quote demonstrates, in his eyes he never failed once:
“I have not failed. I”ve just found 10,000 ways that won”t work.”.
Now that is a great way to look at things
It is faliure if you keep making the same mistakes and never learn from it.
In my opinion Alex has never understood what a business is all about.
“Alex pitched the website as a way for him to pay for attending university,”
He”s an online beggar. His sites offer absolutley no value for the users. He never intends to do business, he”s just looking to cash in on curiosity / stupidity in my eyes. The success of his first site would never have occured if the media saw it as a business. They only covered it cause it was a student doing something new/fresh/unique to pay his bills and most buyers of pixels will have seen it in the same way. No professional marketer would buy pixel ads.
It”s perfectly OK to fail sometimes. The fact that he then tries to do it over and over again in almost the same manner shows that he isnt willing to learn from his failure. And as Einstein said:
“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. ”
but also,
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. “
Well, the examples above are not quite correct – at least regarding Edison !
Edison might have been good at words, but as an inventor he was a total failure.
Who knows how many attempts he really made to get the electrical lightbulb working. Fact is, he never succeeded. It was rather one of his employees who accomplished this, and who later became the greatest electric/electronic genius of all times – Nicola Tesla.
Edison also failed in keeping an agreement, to pay his ”helper” 30000$ if he would solve the challenge. Most of all, he failed to accept his own mistakes and miscalculations, and stubbornly held unto ”his” electrical system, that proved many times to not to be the ideal solution for supplying household energy for everyone – the DC current. Again it was Nicola Tesla, who after the experience of being deceived by Edison, partnered with Westinghouse, and implemented the AC current, which soon lit up the cities and powered the factories.
Edison had more political influence, which is the reason why his lie of being the lightbulb inventor, prevailed up to today. The extraordinary bright minded Nicola Tesla, however was what he was, an inventor – but a poor businessman (and somewhat a psychopath), with no lobby to back him. In fact most major inventions and patents in electro technology, that are still the foundation of todays systems, were invented from him – with no credit given. The only credit is the ”Tesla” as an unit to measure elecro-magnetism.
This just as a correction to the Edison example. Otherwise, yes of course failures are part of the way to success (and surely, even Tesla had its share of it too). Accepted failures are the weeds in need to be removed, to find the solution.