$160,000? Are you kidding me?

I’ve always been a fan of the Million Dollar Home Page. This guy is damned lucky, but he’s also damned smart. He’s sold 999,000 pixels of his web page for $1 per pixel. He didn’t take home that much, though — he’s got a publicist, and several others are helping him with the ads. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s spent over $100K promoting his site. Still, that’s a profit of almost 900 percent. Now he’s auctioning off the last 1,000 pixels on eBay. The going price, as of this post: $160,109. And it’s gone up since I started writing.

$160,109 for a tiny 20 X 50 piece of virtual “real estate,” in the middle of a page full of hundreds of other tiny ads. And don’t think these are a bunch of phonies driving up the price with vaporbids — he’s pre-vetting each bidder.

Of course, the buyer also gets the publicity of being the person who bought the last pixels on the Million Dollar page. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the bidding go over $300K. Heck, he might even make another million on this last 1,000 pixels.

So, if you thought this guy only had one good idea — that he was a shot in the dark, a lottery winner — think again. He’s had two ideas worth $1.16 million in less than six months, and the value of idea #2 is only growing. Watch out for Alex Tew. If I was a betting man, I’d put down a serious chunk of change that 20 years from now, he won’t just be an Internet footnote.

Update: Apparently now the bidding’s down to $153,000. Still a tidy sum, but apparently the top bidder retracted a bid (or however that works on eBay — I still haven’t figured how that site works).