TEENAGER Aaron is proving that money can be made from the comfort of your own home.
Following the news that this week British 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio was paid a reported $30m in the sale of his news app Summly, Aaron, who lives in Cardiff, has scooped up £800 in a couple of months just from setting up an online server.
Although 14-year-old Aaron’s earnings may be overshadowed by D’Aloisio’s massive windfall courtesy of Yahoo, it was thanks to the school pupil’s own tech savvy that he saw an opportunity to start building what could turn out to be his own mini-empire from his bedroom.
Describing himself as a keen gamer, Aaron has, says his father Tony, always been interested in computers.
“I’ve been gaming for quite a long time now. I play a lot of online games with my friends after school,” he reveals.
It was just over a year ago when Aaron first started playing the hit game Minecraft. Originally created by a Swedish developer, it is a game about placing blocks to influence the playing environment and gives massive freedom to the player in terms of where they can go and what they can do in the virtual world.
“I was on this online forum at the time which I was very into and I noticed that they had a small Minecraft server which wasn’t for money-making or anything, just for the community there,” Aaron explains.
Minecraft multiplayer servers are guided by server operators like Aaron who have access to server commands such as setting the time of day, granting players special items and experience points and teleporting players around. Players pay the operators to get such perks within the online world.
Aaron bought a cheap code to play Minecraft off eBay and then decided to set up his own server, but he still didn’t think about making millions.
“I set it up for me and my friends, but I’d never realised that anyone would actually pay me, it was more for fun.”
A couple of months in, Aaron had made enough to pay a freelance coder based in India to help, and then he invested in international advertising.
Now, £800 richer, he’s reinvested £200 into his server at mc-slc.com and says that he’s not motivated by making more.
Aaron’s father Tony reveals that the teen has already taught himself to code in Java, and has expanded his enterprise to include a ‘head of staff’.
“I give him £4 a week pocket money and it just seems pointless now,” Tony laughs.
“I would say we can trust Aaron in various ways – we can trust him not to stay up too late and we can also trust him not to do stuff that he shouldn’t be doing .
“We’ve brought him and his sisters up with a fairly strong moral code – although he spends a lot of time on is computer now, he recognises that, he’s got exams next year and that’ll mean that he’s got to focus more on them and less on making money.”
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