One click away from clients

The tiny pixels on your computer can put you on the road to riches.

If you don't believe me ask Sunaina Bansal, who has brought the pixel advertising revolution to India. The London-based Indian housewife is determined to earn Rs10 million (Dh826,490) through her website www.crorepatipage.com.

Her inspiration is 21-year-old British student and millionaire Alex Tew and his website www.milliondollarhomepage.com, which created history by selling a million pixels of internet advertising space for a dollar each, in five months last year. The strategy, used to raise a university fund, turned out to be an advertising revolution.

Dubai connection

Bansal, who studied in Indian High School Dubai and calls the city her home as her parents and sister are based here, is hoping to cash in on the concept.

The idea is simple. The aim is to create effective and affordable advertising space comprising 1 million pixels for Rs10 (83 fils) each. A click on each advertisement will link visitors to the advertiser's webpage. The adverts would be displayed for at least five years.

She also plans to incorporate discounts for consumers from the advertised sites. The pixels on the crorepati page can only be bought in 100-pixel squares, measuring 10x10 pixels. Her website, which was launched in February, is doing well. So far, she has sold 17,400 pixels, making a tidy sum of Rs174,000 (Dh14,381). Her advertisers include big names such as www.shaadi.com and www.rediff.com.

"The website received 30,000 hits in just two days and my advertisers inform me that they have got 250 hits within 24 hours of advertising on my website," says Bansal, in conversation on the internet.

So is India ready for pixel advertising? "Online advertising is seeing tremendous growth. It is believed that online advertising in India is likely to cross the $100 million mark by 2010. I am confident India is ready for crorepatipage.com."

Her advertisers believe the Rs10 per pixel is money well spent. Hriday Biyani, of Diadem Technologies, a web hosting and web development provider, is one such advertiser. "Initially I wasn't sure how the Indian online community would respond to the concept. But I have been pleasantly surprised by the response that my website has got via www.crorepetipage.com. There have been constant hits. This may prove to be my best online ad spend to date."

Future plans

So how is she going to spend her targeted Rs10 million? Bansal says she hasn't decided yet.

"But I will definitely take some time out to travel," she adds.

And what's next for 27-year-old Bansal?

"I have a long way to go and lots of marketing efforts to undertake. Right now I am concentrating on my website, but once this is over I plan to write a children's book," says the young entrepreneur, whose initial foray into the world of online business seems to have clicked.

VISUAL EFFECT
Online space sold in 100 pixel blocks at the smallest

Pixels, short for Picture Elements, are tiny dots, which make up the representation of a picture in a computer's memory.

Pixel advertising is the term given to visual advertisements on the web, which have their cost calculated dependent on the number of pixels which they occupy. As a general rule, pixel ad websites follow Alex Tew's example by selling pixel ads in 100 pixel "blocks" because this is the smallest size to reasonably display anything meaningful, and remain easily clickable. A few newer sites have additional feature that allows a larger image to appear when visitors hover the cursor over the small pixel ad.