Steve of www.stevepavlina.com has recently written a very informative and long article on How to make money from your blog. The one thing that I liked most in his article was a reference to Alex of Milliondollarhomepage fame who became millionare in few months time with his clever idea of selling pixel for hosting ads.

Alex was in his 3rd year of college and was in need of money to pay for his studies. This is when he came up with the idea of selling one pixel for a dollar as ad space. It was a combination of new idea, great thinking and planned marketing that made it a huge success.

But just with like any other great idea even as soon as news of Alex's success spread on the net, many such similar sites came up over night selling pixels at a discounted prize. Many forums also came into light to support such sites. But while Alex's idea was fresh, most of these sites are no more then a shameless copy, no wonder they are struggling to sell even fraction of their pixel even after many years. Most of these sites are started by lazy people looking for easy money. They don't want to put in any hard work and that's the reason that most of such sites are down within few months of time.

This leads to another discussion of whether the pixel advertising era is finally over. I personally believe that just like google took the idea of search engine and to it to a different level by putting in hard work and implementing innovative ideas, pixel advertising can also work given that it have some freshness to it, and not just a copy for making easy money. Selling for a discount is not a solution. Great idea works, not cheap copy.