Tew did it again: easy money with Bush bashing

Written on 20th December 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Remember Alex Tew? The British entrepreneur who frustrated and inspired millions of people by getting rich with The Million Dollar Homepage? The then 21-year old student needed some money for his study and decided to sell pixels for 1 dollar each. He made 1,037,100 dollars.

In December 2006, Tew gave it another shot with Pixelotto: a lottery where the winner who clicked the right advertisement would win 1 million dollars. The idea “failed“, but Tew still made 153,000 dollars out of it.

These days, Tew is working on a humor start-up called PopJam. But every now and then, he can’t resist the temptation of creating a fun app.

So when a shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist aims for Bush’s face, Tew sees an opportunity: “a stupid little flash game”. Just like some other games concering the same subject, Sockandawe.com attracted million of hits.

That’s where Tew’s business instinct comes in. Instead of desperately trying to cope with the enormous crowds visiting the site, he puts the game up for sale on eBay.com. Guess how much money Tew got himself for Christmas? A sweet total of 7,818 dollars.

“It was just a bit of fun, a bit of an experiment,” Tew told Reuters. “It’s actually turned out to be a useful fundraising exercise for our start-up, which is good given the present economic circumstances.”