Melbourne:
British charity worker Ben Southall has won "the best job in the world" as caretaker of a tropical island pipping a number of contenders including an Indian RJ Anjaan, in an unprecedented global search.
Southall was selected from 15 finalists for the job paying $150,000 Tourism Queensland official website said on Wednesday.
More then 34,000 applications was received by Tourism Queensland for the job of the caretaker of Hamilton Island, on the Great Barrier Relief.
Though a charity worker Southall is not laid back he enjoys bungee-jumping and Ostrich riding.
The 34-year-old has said that he will live with his Canadian girlfriend in the three-bedroom beach house on Halmiton Island.
The job seekers raced to grab the so called "Best job of the world" across the globe after its first ad appeared in the international newspapers and online on January 12.
The campaign attracted immense publicity globally and generated thousands of news stories in newspapers, on television, radio and the Internet.
Typing Best Job in the World into You Tube on Wednesday threw up 19,000 entries and googling the phrase netted to 182,000,000.
"You couldn't get a decent mainstream national campaign for that amount of money, let alone a global one," Nancy Hartley, creative director of Brisbane agency CumminsNitro, which developed the project for Tourism Queensland, was quoted saying in a media report.
"Early on, we joked about being able to do a global campaign on a classifieds budget - well that's pretty much what happened. The fact that this was being picked up and run as news on CNN and BBC World - you just can't buy that sort of publicity" she said.
Tourism Queensland admitted it has kicked in an extra "two or three-hundred thousand" for media management since applications closed in January, but estimates put the value of the return at about $110 million.
That figure is expected to grow by a further $30 million dollars by weeks' end, when the island caretaker position will no longer be vacant.