Pixel advertising seems to have caught the imagination of a lot of people. There are scripts to run a site for sale, pixel ad sites popping up all over the place, and I've even seen a pixel-ad MLM.
I never really bothered to look, until the question came up in a forum - "how effective is pixel advertising"? - and the answer is "not very". I conducted a highly unscientific test by going to Google and typing in 'pixel ads for sale' - and got: Results 1 - 50 of about 1,110,000 for pixel ads for sale.
About one million people, all competing to copy Alex Tew's idea.
What most of them are overlooking is that Alex got about 5 million dollars worth of free advertising by being featured on CNN, ABC, NBC, and the CDC for all I know.
Yes, you can play with a pixel site, but you won't get the free media exposure. Which means you'll have to buy the millions worth of advertising Alex got for free - and spending 5 dollars to make one isn't my idea of running a business.
The trick here is to learn the real lesson - if it's offbeat enough that "Good Morning America" picks you up, you can make money with just about anything.
And then you get to stand around laughing at the copycats who don't grasp the "good Morning America" part of your success story. Thing is - as entrepreneurs we should be looking for a way to do something different, that's "Good-morning"-worthy, and that people will give you money for.
But as for the advertising? I would rather spend some money on a good classified ad in the Post or the Times than on any pixel ad site - because I *know* people read the Times.
Coincidentally, a few days earlier Jason Lewis sent me an article he wrote titled "How To Make Money From Latest Craze Products" - by creating products that complement the latest fad. He used the pet rock from 1975 to illustrate his point.
The story about the pet rock and the knockoff stuck with me, and I've often thought that such fads repeat every 5-15 years. Then, while discussing pixel ads and things that were offbeat enough to get on "Good Morning America", it struck me that we should be due for a revival of the pet rock about now. If you can get the deal with the trademark holder, that is. And even if you can't, there ought to be something in that vein hitting the market for collectibles about now.
Now, the rights to the pet rock are probably sown up, and as throwaway ideas go, it serves best as an example. The idea was original in 1975 - today it's at best a revival, at worst a cheap copycat knockoff.
But a "Pet Rock Revival" is certainly goofy enough to get on TV - and provided you have the deal with the trademark owners in place, they won't be covering your court case on the evening news later that day. Personally, I live on the wrong continent to do anything with this - the pet rocks were never big in Europe. So if you can pick up the idea and run with it - more power to you. Ideas are cheap - turning them into money is work.
The real question you should be asking yourself though isn't "what can I copy from these specific examples?"
It is "what can I create that will catch people by the imagination?"
That's what will get you 5 million dollars worth of free advertising from the media and make you into an overnight success.
Oystein Lund runs the Advice Library and frequently gets inspired by the authors who post their stories there. Visit http://www.AdviceLibrary.com today, and get inspired too!