To me "the biggest overnight success award" goes to Andrey Ternovskiy for Chatroulette. The site climbed high in rankings fast, quickly started generating profits, hundreds of clones came to life (of none of course got any traction although everyone was making it better), you could buy the "roulette script" online and do your own site, and Andrey score a visa to US to work on some other startups, as far as I know. This, in any possible measures, especially with someone of 17 years old, I personally call "overnight success".
There was also a guy selling pixels, which was stunning to me how his out of box thinking got him a million bucks (he is working on a cool idea raising charity money for Africa now). Of course plenty other similar website popup, but none got traction.
Basically he sells 1M "pixels" for $1 each to show advertisings. The pixels you buy have an expiration date so he probably sold more than 1M px. I read somewhere that it works pretty well and brings lots of users to advertisers, probably because of the press and the momentum generated around the service.
fosk, I knew the website just didnt have time to finish my comment, actually. But no, the pixels never expire.
What I learnt with his project is what it means when your project goes viral. To me noone in sound mind would pay a dollar for pixel, boy, I was wrong.
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To me "the biggest overnight success award" goes to Andrey Ternovskiy for Chatroulette. The site climbed high in rankings fast, quickly started generating profits, hundreds of clones came to life (of none of course got any traction although everyone was making it better), you could buy the "roulette script" online and do your own site, and Andrey score a visa to US to work on some other startups, as far as I know. This, in any possible measures, especially with someone of 17 years old, I personally call "overnight success".
There was also a guy selling pixels, which was stunning to me how his out of box thinking got him a million bucks (he is working on a cool idea raising charity money for Africa now). Of course plenty other similar website popup, but none got traction.
The guy that sells pixels made 1M+ with http://milliondollarhomepage.com/
Basically he sells 1M "pixels" for $1 each to show advertisings. The pixels you buy have an expiration date so he probably sold more than 1M px. I read somewhere that it works pretty well and brings lots of users to advertisers, probably because of the press and the momentum generated around the service.
fosk, I knew the website just didnt have time to finish my comment, actually. But no, the pixels never expire.
What I learnt with his project is what it means when your project goes viral. To me noone in sound mind would pay a dollar for pixel, boy, I was wrong.
Now Alex Tew designed this one and its actually pretty cool as well: http://www.waterforward.org/
"The pixels you buy will be displayed on the homepage permanently. The homepage will not change."