Students Pay Off Debt by Using Their Faces to Sell Advertising

Two young British graduates, from Cambridge University have paid off their combined £50,000 (around $80,000) of student debt in a year by selling advertising on their faces. 'Buy My Face' was launched last October after the pair came up with the idea of selling their faces as a canvas for companies to advertise. Ed Moyse and Ross Harper spent £100 on face paint and started approaching small companies, posting photographs of their painted faces decorated with logos on their website. Their exploits attracted a student audience and their social networking presence began to grow giving them exposure to larger companies and their advertising rates increased to provide revenue growth. The traffic driven via their website - 20,000 visitors a month has proved to be of real benefit to the advertisers, along with 800 Twitter followers. Their notoriety is spreading across the world and they have already been invited to act as ambassadors for the 2014 Youth Olympics in China. During the last year over 150 different companies have advertised with the pair and on their last official day - day 366 of the campaign - global financial firm, Ernst and Young paid for Harper and Moyse's face advertising space. Now debt free, Harper and Moyse are planning a new business - a Smartphone app called 'Guess my Picture'. The pair say they now want to inspire fellow students to try their own unique ideas to get out of debt.