Web whiz set to be millionaire

FOUR months ago 21-year-old Alex Tew was wondering how to avoid falling into debt as he prepared to go to university.

Claiming to have made an average of €5,850-a-day since then, he has now crossed money off his list of worries.

The idea behind Alex's new-found wealth was conceived late at night at the family home in Cricklade, Wiltshire, in Britain, where a summer was spent jotting down money-making ideas.

One such wheeze was an advertising website, milliondollarhomepage.com, which he launched on August 26 at a cost of €70.

The page is a grid of million pixels individual spots of screen space which are spilt into 10,000 squares, each 10 pixels by 10 pixels (€100 each).

Alex, the youngest of four brothers and a business management undergraduate, has been selling the 100-pixel squares for 100 US dollars each (around €83) to companies from around the world.

The maths is simple: a million pixels at a dollar apiece. Customers put links to their own websites in the space bought.

The unabashed aim of the site is to make Alex a million dollars a goal he is set to reach early in the New Year.

So far he has made nearly 900,000 US dollars (€578,000).