Teenager Turns Down $16 Million Offer From BBC For News Website

At 17, Nick Coates is the founder and CEO of the most successful news site on the web for young people. In the last 18 months his Sharpenews has had 89 million hits. He has received many offers from media groups, but so far Nick has rebuffed all offers.

Nick founded his news site when he was just 12 years old. He ran it by himself and got 100 visits to his site a month despite it being only a text-based interface. Now the teenager has 70 people on staff around the world, including an accountant, a managing director and 25 journalists. All of them are under the age of 18 and work as volunteers. Nick's site generates 1,000 news items each month and a healthy revenue of $4,800 US (£2,500) per month from advertising. Last year his site received the US company Young Media's Website of the Year award. According to Nick, he has received numerous offers from media groups for his highly successful youth news site, including one of $16 million (£8.5 million) from the BBC. So far Nick has rebuffed all offers, including the BBC's. He does not yet need the money and channels all revenues back into the development of his website. Besides, Nick feels the BBC would "ruin" his idea. Said the teenaged IT entrepreneur: "If I sold it, I'd take away about $7.7 million (£4 million) personally, but I'm not interested in doing that at the moment. The BBC offered me all that money because they don't have an equivalent service for young people, but to be honest I think they would ruin it." Nick thinks he can run Sharpenews much better than the BBC. Right now the news on his site is written up by the young for the young. Nick is concerned the BBC would use older people to write news items for the young. "BBC news goes right over my head, to be honest. Our young reporters gather news that interests them, and it seems to work...I set the site up because a lot of young people didn't have a website to view the news written in a way they would understand." The overwhelming success of his site astounds Nick. He has especially seen it take flight over the past two years when internet news has taken off. Nick's parents are incredibly proud of what he has achieved and without their guidance or interference. They just let him run with his idea and he has done very well indeed. Nick's plans for the future include university and working on youth projects abroad. If you try to visit Nick's website. You will see there is a message saying the site has been suspended until further notice due to extremely high server loads. I think since the news story about him and his website came out, he has received a ton of hits.