A 21-year-old British man has made over a million dollars in less than six months by selling individual pixels to advertisers on a Web site called Milliondollarhomepage.com. In order to fund his studies at university, Alex Tew had the outlandish idea of creating a Web site funded by advertisers who would buy individual pixels on a Web page, which would in turn construct an impressive collage made up of very small advertisements. Tew charged advertisers $1 per pixel on a site that contained one million pixels with the goal of earning one million dollars. Well, a few short months after …

Larry Kramer, a founder of Marketwatch.com and current president of CBSNews.com. speaks with the San Jose Mercury News about the future of broadband content and video search. Kramer believes broadband video represents the future of media consumption, because busy consumers don't have time these days to wait or plan around the show times of their favorite programs. TV content on iPods is a nice alternative for business travelers, for example, but more than that, the demand for on-demand content is there. Kramer says CBSNews.com is constantly sold out of its broadband video content and is adding more all the time. …

Like just about everybody else out there in news media, Ad Age is billing 2005 as the year the media industry's scales finally started their inexorable tip in the direction of the Internet. Broadcast TV ratings fell to their lowest all-time levels, newspaper stocks plummeted, and Google rose to prominence as the world's most valuable media company. As the article points out, Google's $130 billion market cap makes it worth more than the combined total of Time Warner, the no. 2 media company, four of the top newspaper companies including New York Times Co., Clear Channel Communications, the leading …

An Iowa judge has thrown the book--hard--at a Florida spammer, awarding the owner of an Iowa-based CIS Internet Services, an Internet Service Provider, $11.2 billion in damages after he received millions of unsolicited messages advertising mortgage and debt consolidation services. The ruling was the result of a lawsuit filed in 2003 by company owner Robert Kramer III against James McCalla of Florida. McCalla was accused of sending more than 280 million illegal e-mails into the CIS network, which provides Internet services to eastern Iowa and parts of Illinois. Kramer claimed that he is entitled to $10 per illegal e-mail under …

In an attempt to connect with its large and lucrative user base of Web- savvy teens and 20somethings, MTV Networks' Comedy Central brand today is introducing a series of Web-only programs on MotherLoad, Comedy Central's online channel. The comedy content maker had to do something to attract more people to MotherLoad, a side of MTV's business analysts called "dormant" in the last six years. Indeed, last month, the site reported a meager 109,000 unique users. MTV is banking on such series as "All Access: Middle Ages" (the so-called inside story behind history's coolest plagues and crusades), and "The Golden Age" …

Financial experts don't expect Google to split its stock, priced at $450 per share, which would allow more ordinary investors to purchase shares in the company. Experts say that because demand is going so strong, the company has little incentive to split its stock. Moreover, analysts say the search giant, ever taken with ideology, might even be philosophically opposed to a split in the manner of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, whose stock has never been split and currently trades at $89,690. It's rare for a technology company to keep such a high stock price, particularly because trades are generally conducted …

We all know it's tough at the top, but who would have thought ten years ago we were talking about that being a problem for Apple Computer? Its iPod, of course, has changed the music industry, making it the biggest target for competitors at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, according to a Reuters report. New MP3 players from Samsung Electronics, Sandisk Corp and XM Satellite Radio are all gunning for Apple's top spot. One new video MP3 player from EchoStar has a bigger screen and lets users watch TV for free by downloading DVR programming directly to …

A new music service called The Orchard deploys a strategy of trying to exploit an old inefficiency in the music business: instead of trying to sell thousands of copies of a few hundred albums--the way major record labels have been doing for years--the music distributor is seeking to sell a few hundred copies to several thousand consumers. The Orchard buys music from small independent labels and then resells them to online music services like iTunes, Napster, and Yahoo! Music. Online music stores have ushered in a massive change in the music business, giving consumers unprecedented choice and the freedom to …

Analysts have pegged online classifieds leader Monster Worldwide as an acquisition target, adding that a takeover by Google, which is building its own classifieds engine called Google Base, would be a particularly smart match for both companies. A takeover is still pure speculation, but neither company would confirm or deny interest in a union. Monster Worldwide would cost Google, which has $7.6 billion in cash and a stock valued at 50 times yearly earnings, approximately $5 billion. The online classifieds company is growing healthily--sales are expected to jump 19 percent this year and profits should be up 35 percent. Analysts …

Akimbo, a provider of TV delivered via the Internet, has announced a potentially lucrative deal with MovieLink, an online movie property owned by six Hollywood studios, to deliver movies over the Internet to consumers' televisions. Akimbo provides its broadband content services over the Web, but will now produce a set top box manufactured by Thomson and sold under the RCA brand in an attempt to attract more customers. The notion of bringing movies to television screens via the Internet represents a new method of distribution for movie studios and television companies, and presents a real threat to cable companies, analysts …