DO YOU want to be a millionaire? Alex Tew does, and the 21-year-old student from Nottingham University is well on course to achieving his dream.

Tew, the brains behind the Million Dollar Homepage website, has netted more than $450,000 (£254,000) in just two months. He is growing richer by the day by tapping into the power of the internet, which has become one of the quickest ways to make a fortune.

Look at a list of the richest people in the world and online entrepreneurs are rapidly rising up the ranks.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google, the internet search engine, are worth $11 billion each, according to the Financial Times. And they’re only 32. Pierre Omidyar, the 38-year-old founder and chairman of Ebay, the online auction site, is estimated to be worth $10 billion.

Far from slowing after the dotcom bubble burst, the web is growing at a faster rate than ever before. Over the past year more than 17m new websites have been registered, according to Netcraft, a monitoring firm. That is more than the 16m sites added in 2000, when net fever was at its peak.

Most of these sites aren’t going to turn their creators into millionaires, but the web is still ripe for exploitation.

Martin Binks, the director of the institute for enterprise and innovation at Nottingham University Business School, said: “For people who are naturally creative and can think laterally, the internet still has enormous potential.”

So what is the secret of success? Tew’s idea came to him as he was thinking of ways to fund himself through university.

“It was late August and I was brainstorming ideas to make money fast,” explained Tew. “So I wrote down ‘How can I become a millionaire?’ and started jotting down the attributes that the idea would need.”

He decided that it had to be simple to set up; it had to be a good story that would capture the public and media’s imagination; and it would need a good name that people would easily remember.

Twenty minutes later an idea popped into his head that struck gold on all three counts, and the Million Dollar Homepage website was born.

Tew decided he would set up a site with a screen divided up into 10,000 sections, and sell each section to advertisers for $100 (£56).

Click on an advert and you are taken to an advertiser’s home page.