A 17-year-old teenager has gone viral for rejecting $8million to advertise on his COVID19 website.
The Jewish teenager, identified as Avi Schiffmann became known worldwide after creating a website that keeps the world updated on the coronavirus pandemic as it spreads.
The website, ncov2019.live, has been visited by millions of people since it launched in late December. It has become the biggest coronavirus tracking website in the world.
It tracks deaths, numbers of cases locally and globally, and provides an interactive map, information on the disease, and a Twitter feed.
He said: “The main goal of it was to provide just an easy way to see the straight facts and the data,
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“I didn’t want to make it hard. You know, you shouldn’t have to go through government websites and download like a daily PDF that’s probably out of date by the time you read it, and, you now have to go through all kinds of complicated things, just to see, you know, the straight facts.”
He added: “I started working on this project at Christmastime, when there were fewer than 1,000 confirmed cases — all in mainland China,”
What is so interesting about his website is that it also updates on the number of recoveries which can’t be found on many new sites.
“I started to get a lot of emails saying that the site was kind of overly negative,” he recalled. “I decided that it would be really cool if I could show how many people were recovering, to give people a more positive outlook and maybe more hope. So I added that to the quick facts. In every single country, you can see how many people have recovered, which I think gives people a lot of hope.”
Due to the huge success of his website, the young computer guru started getting requests to run adverts on his site, he even got an offer of $8million to run an advert on his site.
However, to the surprise of many, he turned the offer down. He told his mother: “I got emails asking me to put ads on my website, in fact one of them is offering my $8million, But I turned them down.”
He added: “I think it’s a lot easier for me to turn down things like that because I don’t care that much about making money.”
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