Kader the entrepreneur

Rania Al Hussaini speaks to the 19-year-old who is selling space on his website for a dirham a pixel

Kader the student
Kader Arafath, a 19-year-old student, is studying engineering at Bits-Pilani, Dubai campus at the Dubai Knowledge Village. He is in his second year.

Kader the ambitious
With the help of his sister, he set up www.mydirhams.com, a website which works on the pixel ad concept. Kader is trying to sell one million pixels for Dh1 each.

Kader was inspired by a similar website in the UK.

Kader's logic
How does it work? According to Kader, a pixel is worth Dh1, and anybody is welcome to buy 100-pixel blocks, each measuring 10x10 pixels.

Kader's homepage is divided into 100 columns and 100 rows. Buyers can display an image/ad/logo of their choice in the space they have bought. They can even have the image linked to their own website.

"Once you have paid for the image, you can access it again without payment for a minimum of five years," said Kader.

That is the duration that Kader guarantees the website will be up and running.

"I thought creating such a website will be helpful, because it will be the first website of its kind in the region," he said. "And it will help me financially in paying my tuition fees."

Kader has been advertising his website through newspaper ads and emails. He is hopeful that companies will respond and queue up to buy pixel blocks.

Kader's reasons
Kader believes in making internet ads inoffensive to browsers. "People go for newspaper ads and not internet ads. What I am trying to do is to make them start trusting the internet ads."

Besides, he says, his website doesn't give ads in the form of pop up windows, "which can be very annoying".

Kader's future
"I am doing this as a part-time job. It helps me communicate with the external world and I use my own website to apply and look for jobs. I am planning to finish my studies and some day I want to start my own engineering company."

Why should I buy pixels?
"Because you will have an image that links to your site on the homepage that could potentially be seen by millions of people over the coming years," says Kader on his website www.mydirhams.com.

"The site will be online for at least five years, that's guaranteed, but the idea is to keep it online forever."