Smart scheme indeed. Amid a surge in publicity, advertising rolled in, and Tew's site generated $1 million in profits in very short order.

That was a year and a half ago. Now Tew is launching a new version called Pixelotto, hoping to repeat his earlier success. This time, though, he's adding some bold new elements. For one, advertising prices will be higher, twice as high. Pixelotto will sell at $2 a pixel until the homepage is full.

But the big difference, hence the name Pixelotto, is that visitors stand a chance to share in that ad revenue, and in a big way. The new game is really a lottery.

Visitors will be invited to click on the ads, and from those visitors a winner will be chosen at random and given a million-dollar prize purse. He or she will also receive another $100,000 to be donated to his or her favorite charity. Visitors will be required to register, and when they click on an ad, they will be entered for the prize drawing at the end. Users can click on up to 10 ads a day.

With Pixelotto, Tew will also make money, another million for himself.

But will Tew be able to pull it off a second time? That's the big question.  He seems not very worried. 

“It is already taking off and beginning to snowball,” he tells Media Life. Once again, he believes, people will come, and not just out of curiosity but for the chance to win big dollars, Advertisers will sign on for the value of having their messages viewed by millions for the quite modest price of $2 a pixel, quite a deal. (Actually, it comes out to $200 per ad, since the minimum buy is 100 pixels.)

Tew thought up the idea for his orginal  milliondollarhomepage.com, back in August 2005, and within two days the site up and running. And it seemed that in no time the fast-as-lightning viral internet was abuzz over the site, which in turn generated loads of coverage in the traditonal media and caused traffic to soar. At its peak, the site saw 863,000 unique visitors a day. 

Within four months, Tew had sold out his entire ad inventory and was a million dollars better off for it. Recalls Tew: “I never really expected to make a million dollars. It just took off. My original thinking was that if I aim for this bold, brazen target of $1 million, I might get part of it.”

It proved a life-changing experience, as they say in self-improvement circles. Tew, who is now 22, has chucked the university. At age 8, he says, he was drawing up comic books and selling them to friends, and he sees what he's doing now as simply an extension of that. “I had always wanted to be an entrepreneur."

Which bring us back to Pixelotto. Milliondollarhomepage.com was a one-off, but the new game will be ongoing, starting up again once the home page is filled with and the prize awarded.

Pixelotto launched on Tuesday, and so far it has attracted 191 advertisers and 118,213 clicks.

But can Tew really pull it off a second time? Opinions are mixed.

“The million-dollar web site was a huge word-of-mouth or viral success for a number of reasons,” says Toni Smith, head of strategy and communications at the Viral Factory in London. Among them were Tew’s honesty about his mission and its simplicity.

She thinks his new project will draw in lot of people interested to know what Tew’s up, And there's the prospect of personal gain, she notes, an added incentive if there ever was one.

But there are risks too. The internet moves quickly, and what's hot this month may be a snore by the next, warns Henry Stokes, director at Circus Street, a digital consultancy in London. 

Plus, this second venture hasn't the engaging innocence of the first, a young kid trying to make a buck. “Everyone likes to hear about the average man on the street making money back from big multinationals,” says Stokes.

But Tew isn't that kid anymore. He's a fat cat, a mini-multinational in his own right, and that's not going to work in his favor. Or so Stokes thinks.