Cash pours in for student with $1 million Web idea. (C)hances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet. Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page.

Clever enough to realize that people will occasionally part with their money for something essentially meaningless, that is. (Yes, I realize that the first group of folks who did this got some value from the notoriety of being on this garish billboard, but the minute other sites emulate this the “value” for buyers will plummet to nothing.)

This is reminiscent of the operators who sell pieces of paper allegedly naming stars after anyone you’d like, for a fee, of course — and without authority from the folks, i.e. scientists, who actually do the official naming (actually numbering). Compared to some of these “services,” selling pixels is an honorable way to make money.

These gambits may be clever, if meaningless. Ultimately, they’re no big deal if buyers are in on the joke. Do they understand that the joke is on them?