The Business Poster

19-year old student Michael Nana of Quebec, Canada’s Bishop’s University was browsing the Internet one day and – while on MySpace – was continually pestered by ads all over the web page. A thought then crossed the computer science student’s mind: What if there was a way to put all the ads into one place and make them interactive? That idea soon blossomed into The Business Poster (www.thebusinessposter.com).

Inspired by Alex Tew’s The Million Dollar Homepage to make money to fund a college education, Nana came up with the idea of selling advertising space by making each ad or banner on a slideshow, based on different categories, shuffling them at a certain frequency for different durations. He worked on his idea for a few days before finally launching it in November this year.

Owning A Piece Of His Web Real Estate

Nana explains how it works. “Let’s say you choose your ad to appear once every hour and you upload your ad at 12:00 pm. Then at 1:00 pm, your ad will appear in the slide show you selected and will shuffle in that slideshow for a minute till the clock turns to 1:01 pm and then the ad disappears,” he elaborates. “At 2:00 pm the ad will come up again and shuffle in the slide show for one minute and then disappear at 2:01 pm and so forth till your ad expires.” It’s a simple concept, really – but Nana thinks it can work for advertisers.

“We thought that with everyone liking to look at images in slide shows, ads in slide shows will be more appealing,” he says. “And for the advertisers, the concept in the upload mechanism makes them get their money’s worth.”

“If it was just upload a banner in a slide show, then the first people in the selection will be favored,” he reasons. The base price for an ad is US$1 for an ad that appears once a day for a month. To date the site gets some 3000 hits per day and is currently ranked 380,000 on Alexa.

The Business Poster is certainly not groundbreaking – nor even elegantly designed – but it’s been a fun experiment for the college freshman. “I’m studying computer science so that may be the reason I love creating these geeky stuff. I just like finding a different way of doing stuff pretty much,” he says. “That’s why I decided to give a go at The Business Poster.”

“I mean there is no harm in trying, right?”

No Michael, there isn’t – this sure beats getting wasted or chasing skirts all the time like what most other 19-year olds do.