[imagesource:here]

Avi Schiffmann isn’t your average 17-year-old.

Dangle $8 million in front of the average teenager, no matter what strings are attached, and you’re more than likely going to ink a deal, but Schiffmann says he doesn’t want to be a “profiteer”.

He’s the brains behind ncov2019, one of the most visited coronavirus trackers in the world, with a wealth of info about the virus, using data scraped from the WHO, CDC, and other government websites.

It even has a ‘survival rate calculator’, which you can see here.

His site attracts more than 30 million visitors each day, which has provided some lucrative opportunities, but Schiffmann won’t budge.

Business Insider reports:

…it’s unsurprising that Schiffmann has gotten offers to put ads on the website. One offer in particular would have contracted Schiffmann to keep up the site for $8 million [around R150 million], which he turned down, and he says he likely could have made over $30 million if he’d put up his own ads, but he says that’s not the goal of the site.

“I’m only 17, I don’t need $8 million…I don’t want to be a profiteer,” he said. At first, he was almost reluctant to talk about ads, which he says everyone asks about. Then, he explained his reasoning. Schiffmann said that he didn’t want popups ruining the UI, which would be something out of his control if he sold the site. He doesn’t want to be contractually obligated to keep up the site, or to make changes that he doesn’t agree with.

Specifically, he knows many of his visitors from around the world don’t have very fast internet connections, so adding on ads and trackers would slow the site down and maybe even make it unusable for them.

That’s a level of self-restraint not common among teens.

There is a button where people can donate money, labelled ‘buy me a coffee’, with donations starting from $3, but the amount that raises is nowhere near what he could have made through ad sales.

He’s clearly skilled at what he does, and job offers have come his way from the likes of Microsoft, but he’s in no rush to make any big decisions just yet:

The coronavirus pandemic doesn’t look like it will be over any time soon, and Schiffmann plans to continue actively tracking it until the end. As long as the site is up, he says he will keep working at it and adding new features. Once the pandemic is safely over,  he’ll take the servers down, and maybe make a page that compares COVID-19 to SARS or the Spanish flu. He thinks it might be a historical piece of the coronavirus people can look back on.

For now, he spends hours each day coding, often at the expense of his schoolwork, and says he once spent 50 hours straight working on the site, so those coffees must have come in handy.

Something tells me he’ll be just fine down the road, whatever he decided to pursue.

You can explore Avi’s website here.

[source:businsider]