A GIRL looks into a nightclub mirror and her reflection gazes out at the world. Today this image, called My Best Friend and I, by Eleanor Lindsay Fynn, a London art student, will be viewed online by up to 6m people.

There is not a Damien Hirst shark or a Tracey Emin rumpled bed in sight, but this is the latest brainchild of Charles Saatchi, the advertising tycoon who almost single-handedly created the Young British Art movement through his patronage.

Saatchi has taken the concept of YouTube, the hugely successful do-it-yourself video website, and squeezed it into the art world. He has replaced his old haunts — the warehouses and galleries of Hoxton and Brick Lane in London’s East End where his very presence could add zeros to an artist’s asking price — for a sprawling website where the whole world can exhibit its art.

His idea, Your Gallery, originally conceived as a stopgap between the closure of his gallery in London’s County Hall last year and the opening of a new one in Chelsea next summer, has become a runaway success.

The opening of its own “youth wing” called Stuart — short for student art — has helped quadruple its global audience. Last week the site temporarily crashed under the weight of visitors to Saatchi’s virtual gallery: 6m each day and rising.

Collectors, dealers, exhibition organisers and museum curators are all logging on alongside amateur art lovers to try to spot next year’s new talent.

Each day last week 500 art students were adding images of their works to the site in the hope of being discovered. The site also allows them to chat online with each other and exchange ideas on their work.

Already there are more than 25,000 artists on Your Gallery. Some are enfants terribles in the Hirst mould, others are savvy watercolourists from village art clubs. At least 2,000 have put video art on the site to compete alongside a Welsh tearoom offering handicrafts.

Works on the largely unpoliced site range from haunting images of children with their mouths taped over to an oil painting of an owl from Bedfordshire.

Lindsay Fynn, 25, a student at Goldsmiths College, London, has already sold her photograph — meant to portray the antithesis of celebrity culture — to her art teacher for £250. Another picture, Portrait of a Man in a Top Hat, has been bought by an American collector for £350. In March she is holding her first exhibition — in Singapore.

The photographer, originally from Devon, said: “I originally did a physics degree at Cambridge but it was seeing the art in the Saatchi Gallery that pushed me over to art. Stuart is a great idea. This collector in the US saw my picture and bought it. I have put the money straight back into my photography.”

Saatchi, 63, whose wife is Nigella Lawson, the TV chef, has vowed not to buy anything himself in the site’s first year “to allow it to reach its own level”. But he said last week: “There is something thrilling about seeing the work of young artists for the first time even before their school shows.

“There are a number of very interesting artists on Stuart that I have already passed on to dealers that I work closely with. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.”

Bernard Jacobson, a London gallery owner, has already bought two paintings from art students at the capital’s Central St Martins College as an investment. “We are in the maelstrom of a lunatic art market that is going so fast that the website makes sense,” he said.

“I for one do not have the time any more to get to student shows. Charles Saatchi seems to have a genius for catching our time. You have got to hand it to him.”

Ben Young, 33, a student who has sold one of his paintings to Jacobson for £750, said: “Obviously, you hope Charles Saatchi is watching and will magically pick up the phone and buy all your work.”

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