The student entrepreneur who set out to make $1 million by selling pixels on a website is set to achieve his goal today - and collect a $150,000 bonus.

Alex Tew started his site - milliondollarhomepage.com - in August in a bid to avoid being swamped in student debt. Five months later, he has already made $999,000 (more than £560,000) after selling all but 10 of the 10,000 squares of space on the page to advertisers for $100 each.

The final squares are being sold on eBay in an auction that will end today. The top bid so far has been $153,100 (£86,725) in a sale that has attracted more than 1.5 million visitors and more than 2.7 million page impressions in the past week

Flush with funds, Mr Tew, who is 21 years old, left his home in Cricklade, Wiltshire, last autumn to start a business degree at Nottingham University. Having completed his first term – during which his web venture was earning him $4,000 a day - he has now decided to defer his studies until September in order to "consolidate my financial position, pay the taxman and explore some of the new opportunities that have presented themselves", he told the Evening Standard.

Mr Tew has also been busy appearing on television chat shows in America, where his enterprising project has turned him into a minor celebrity.

The site, which offered investors a chance to "own a piece of internet history", is now destined to become a business school case study, with academics heaping praise on its "brilliant simplicity". It has also spawned a legion of bootleg efforts, hoping to cash in on its success.

"There are still literally hundreds of people e-mailing me wanting pixels on the homepage," Mr Tew said. "Some are wondering why I don’t open a second page.

"Well, I won’t do that because I am determined to maintain the integrity and degree of exclusivity intrinsic to the million-pixel concept … I am doing the most fair and logical thing."

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