A young man was earning 100,000 yuan (US$12,082) a month from his music download Web site, the Shenzhen Economic Daily reported Sunday.

The Web site, called YYMP3, once ranked 420th worldwide in terms of visitor flow, according to statistics by www.amazon.com and www.alexa.com, the newspaper said.

Zou Guobin, 23, established the Web site in 2001 when he was a school student.

Since the end of last year, Zou has been in talks to sell the Web site, and he plans to create a new site if the deal is clinched.

In 1998, Zou learned Web page designing in the hope of demonstrating his artistic work online.

Born into a well-to-do family, Zou's father gave him more than 2,000 yuan per month after he started studying at an industrial school in 1999.

He spent less than 800 yuan a month and used his savings to buy an Internet domain and established his first Web site in the same year.

Unexpectedly, the entertainment and games site attracted 30,000 users at a time when the Internet was not so popular.

A year later, Zou earned his first 500 yuan from an advertiser.

Zou established his music Web site in 2001 and spent almost all his time on it. It was attracting more than 100,000 visitors a day.

After he graduated in 2002, Zou declined to work for his father in the real estate industry, but visited Shanghai and Beijing to learn from other music site operators. He was enrolled by the Shenzhen Institute of Information Technology in the same year.

The Web site's income from advertisements, short messages and music sales began to soar, and the youth site reportedly attracted attention from some big brand names, including L'Oreal and Pepsi.

Zou made several thousand yuan a month, and the figure kept rising. Zou was too busy to continue his studies and dropped out of the college.

He said a Beijing investor would buy his site for 4 million yuan, and he would continue working with the site for six months to a year for a smooth transfer.

(Shenzhen Daily February 22, 2005)