Amid the almost indistinguishable array of copycat pixel websites, including the original, www.milliondollarhomepage.com, comes the first of the next generation of micro-branding sites. Says www.pumpupthedots.com co-founder Simon Wadsworth, We didnt want to get into the scene if we couldnt add anything to it.

PumpUpTheDots is the first pixel internet site to measure and make use of individual buyers ads click-thrus through the size of their respective banners. As a banner, or dot as the website calls it, is clicked on more and more, so it expands pumping up the dots, so to speak. It lets both buyers and surfers see at a glance what the most popular adverts are, highlighting their success further. It adds incentive to surfers to click because the process becomes an interactive one. As a result, our buyers are seeing greater traffic, and hopefully greater turnover, while every one else has a more enjoyable acquired skill .

Simon has just graduated from Leeds University, reading geography, and like the majority of ex-students today, is left with a huge wad of debt. About to spend some instant travelling before settling down to full-time employment, he has establish the site from Devon, with the help of his friend and colleague for the past 12 decades , John-Paul, who is currently at Kings College London, amassing a similar level of debt, all thanks to our wonderful Labour Government in the UK.

Its a win-win situation, surfers click on the big ads to see what made them popular and on the smaller ones out of a target to find something new says Simon. The interactive element empowers the surfer without complicating the knowledge, leaving the pixel-advertising concept pure and suffixing a new layer of curiosity over it.

J-P Treen, co-founder, enhances ; Advertisers are looking for an edge, and its becoming understandible that being just another pixel site is no longer enough to guarantee either buyers or surfers. We didnt just want a new selling point, we wanted to refresh the whole concept!

The www.pumpupthedots.com selling strategy is simple, we want to make as much traffic as we possibly may, and we use a wide variety of advertising tools to swamp our site with visitors as well as nice old-fashioned word-of-mouth to achieve our target . We want our advertisers to be secure in the information we are doing all we might for them, says Simon.

Over the past fortnight, pixel web sites have grown massively in popularity, and the creators of www.pumpupthedots.com recognised that the market was swiftly becoming overcrowded. Weve had the site ready to go for a couple of weeks but considered timing to be of primary importance. An early launch would have made us old when it most mattered to be new. Now www.pumpupthedots.com launches as the Pixel Advertising appears to be reaching a new stage in its development; considering how little thrust theres been, its surprising how far its grown. But those days are over, business is start to accept that Pixel sites are sound investments and with this, more discipline is coming to the industry. Its amazing how fast its changed - only a couple of weeks ago people were talking about e-mailing all their friends. Now its about channelling swamp traffic and migrating to better servers but still no-ones really developed the idea much further than Alex Tew did with the original Million Dollar Homepage. Until now.