"Every time someone places a banner on my website, the popularity of the latter grows: other advertisers see it's popular, and join it, too", says Terry Hladyak, a recent homeless immigrant and the owner of MakeMeShare.com. "The chain reaction had started", he adds.
When history teacher Terry Hladyak first left Ukraine in hopes of finding a similar job in Canada, he quickly learned that a night security guard was as close as he was going to get. With no savings, the 33-year-old immigrant was homeless within two weeks.
"I only had enough money to rent a room for that long," he explains. "Whatever I was making back at my security job wasn't enough to save anything."
At night, he worked as a security guard for a new condo. By day, his home was a public library where he would find himself a secluded corner, pile the table up with books and put his head down for a few hours.
When he'd wake from his nap, Hladyak would use the library's free Internet access to research what kind of business he could start online.
He knew he needed a good idea and a gimmick to sell it. With the help of programming books he read in book stores-- he says they were more current than the library's -- he finally decided on developing a pixel advertising website he's called Makemeshare.com.
Each of his advertising pages contains a grid of 1,000x500 pixels, the dots that make up a computer screen grid. His plan is to sell pixels as advertising space, costing $2 US a pixel on the homepage and $1 US a pixel on the others. The minimum purchase is $100 for a tiny 10x10 pixel square to hold the buyer's logo or design. Clicking on that space takes readers to the advertiser's website.
Pixel advertising isn't new. A poor British student started the Million Dollar Homepage to pay his tuition, selling his one million pixels to advertisers for $1 each. Through word of mouth, blogs and media stories, he grossed a cool million.
Hladyak was following his lead, but needed a new twist to get the crucial Internet buzz to attract advertisers. So he's pledged that if he earns $5 million in the next year by selling out his pixel grids, he will donate half of it to charity -- hence the name, MakeMeShare.
The website was online on August 1st, 2008, and in 2 months Hladyak made enough money to quit his security job and focus on the online business. He made enough money to leave the street and rent a room.
In July 2009, Hladyak had increased the time he needs to reach the $5mln mark from 1 to 5 years. So far, he made over $80,000 with makemeshare.com, the amount one can conclude from the number and size of banners displayed on his website.
Not bad for a recently homeless person, who had started his business by utilizing free Internet in public libraries.
Toronto, Canada
Sources: Toronto Sun; MakeMeShare!