17-year old girl makes up to $70,000 a month with MySpace site


ashley_qualls.jpgFast Company published a fairly long article in the September edition of their magazine about the 17-year old Ashley Qualls.

This girl runs a MySpace layout and graphics site called Whateverlife. I never heard about this site before but she seems to be doing amazingly well, according to the article the three-year old site receives 7 million unique visitors and 60 million page views a month and this earns her up to $70,000 a month. Most of this revenue seems to come through Google AdSense and ValueClick.


At 17 going on 37 (at least), Ashley is very much an Internet professional. In the less than two years since Whateverlife took off, she has dropped out of high school, bought a house, helped launch artists such as Lily Allen, and rejected offers to buy her young company. Although Ashley was flattered to be offered $1.5 million and a car of her choice–as long as the price tag wasn’t more than $100,000–she responded, in effect, Whatever. 🙂 “I don’t even have my license yet,” she says.

Ashley is evidence of the meritocracy on the Internet that allows even companies run by neophyte entrepreneurs to compete, regardless of funding, location, size, or experience–and she’s a reminder that ingenuity is ageless. She has taken in more than $1 million, thanks to a now-familiar Web-friendly business model. Her MySpace page layouts are available for the bargain price of…nothing. They’re free for the taking. Her only significant source of revenue so far is advertising.

I already knew that MySpace related sites can bring in a lot of money but this story amazed me, the kind of money she’s pulling in from this site is stunning. Looks like I’m in the wrong niche lol

You can read the full story over here. One of the funny things is that a court ruled in January that neither Ashley nor her parents are allowed to manage her finances:

Until she turns 18, next June, a court-appointed conservator is controlling Whateverlife’s assets; Ashley must request funds for any expense outside the agreed-upon monthly budget.

The arrangement, she says, affects her ability to react in a volatile industry. “It’s not like I’m selling lemonade,” she says. Besides, it’s her company. If she wants to contract developers or employ her mother, Ashley says, why shouldn’t she be able to do it without the conservator’s approval?

So the teenager has hired a lawyer. She wants to emancipate herself and be declared an adult. Now. At 17. Why not just sit tight until June? The girl trying to grow up fast can’t wait that long.

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104 responses to “17-year old girl makes up to $70,000 a month with MySpace site”

  1. Funny how she has to get a lawyer to get adult status. Seems like the system has no problem making 15 & 16 year olds adults as soon as they commit serious crimes.

  2. Would you say that when people try to sound intelligent, they should use correct grammar and spelling in addition to the big words?

  3. This makes me want to f*cking kill myself when I see people half my age -in a flash of luck- succeeding. Jealousy? You bet. I’m fucking jealous because I’m a white guy that lived in a f*cking nigger neighborhood resulting in the destruction of the first 18 years of my young life. My psychology was mangled and deformed at a young age, never to be recovered. My potential was squandered on trying to “impress” niggers, trying to BE a nigger at one point. All I wanted was to fit in. The more I tried, the more everyone pushed me away. I couldn’t be myself cause niggers would beat the shit out of me so I opted for them just to “laugh” at me trying to act black instead. It transformed me into an anti-social angry “hacker” who, instead of have becoming a “professional” programmer or network engineer or entrepreneur, makes a living off of Internet CRIME. No friends on the white-side since my demeanor and speech was shaped by blacks , no friends on the black side AGAIN because of the same demeanor but different color skin making me completely undesirable and useless to either the human OR inferior communities (cracker/wigger).

    I had so much potential. I never had the chance this girl had. The killer is that its my fault, but how could I have known living among niggers could cascade into a chain-reaction that would annihilate the rest of my natural life? I could have left those niggers at any time but no, I begged my parents to stay in the midst of drugs and animalistic violence and “black-on-everything” crime. I just HAD to impress the niggers (I never did). It rubbed off on me and made me an “internet nigger”. Using my brain to commit crimes on the Internet because I couldn’t do it on the street like those sub-human animals I have so turned into. 🙁

    Fuck it. Good luck to this girl. All she needs to know is, she does not know how lucky she really is to have that loving family and people of her own kind surrounding and supporting her.

  4. Dude, that’s some stupid **** to say. If she took that $70K per month, lived well under her means, and invested it wisely, she would be set for life in very short order.

    If you can’t see the value to investing her time in a rapidly growing business before the chance passed, I don’t know what to say.

    Beyond the point, don’t you think she knows she can go back to school if this all dies down?

    Course, as most people, she is probably not enough to save most of this windfall.

  5. “as successful as she is”? I’m sorry but that is not proper english, you don’t end sentences with prepositions.

  6. Good for her. ITs wonderful what the internet can do for you! She definately utilized her the tools that are available! A thumbs up for you

  7. 😎 I’ve been using Whateverlife for years. She deserves it all. That website has amazing layouts that must take a lot of time to do. It’s very well organized and she’s never charged a cent for a layout.

  8. STOP FUXXING WHINING!
    How stupid do you have to be?
    “I had so much potential”
    “My life was screwed up by others”

    If you have anythin else than beans between your ears – GO OUT THERE AND BECOME SOMETHING!!!!

    Luck has nothing to do with it. You have to earn everything you get. Those who seem lucky, might just have found a short cut, but they worked their way there. Just like the girl. She didn’t just “magically get the money”, she designs layouts and gets clicks. It’s simple, easy and profitable. She’s not lucky – she’s clever – – – and not a whiny little bitch like you!

  9. The problem with her site is that myspace is soon coming out with their internal layout system, so all her graphics and layout traffic is coming to an end very quickly.

    And when that happens, you will need to see how a 17 year old how to survive in a downhill business. You can make a lot of money in this business fast and quick, but the money can be gone real quick as well…

  10. First of all…she should have stayed in school and completed her education….she could get a degree in web design..and be even more successful…sound like she let the money go to her head…and thinks she don’t need any education to be successful, but that won’t last forever…nothing ever does especially in today technial world.

  11. Bill gates dropped out of college and look at him! He’s the richest guy in the world now 😕 !

  12. The title of the article is “17-year old girl makes up to $70,000 a month with MySpace site” which means only one month did she make this munch, which is still quite an achievement not only given her age but the amount of money in given time is quite astonishing.

  13. 🙁 she is in it for the money she buys graphics for other porple and makes moeny off them alos takes tham from others she sucks she dont do it for the love of makeing pople happy only for the money wore

  14. Hey genius, if you want to write about proper English, you might want to think about capitalizing the “E” in the proper noun.

  15. So successful she doesn’t have a high-school education… Awesome. When MySpace is relegated to “Web 2.0” history what will she do without an education?

    Who cares though, seriously. We need ditch-diggers and fry-cooks so, yeah, let her remain an ignorant kid. The smart thing to do would be to continue her education and appoint someone to run her business, since the site isn’t that expansive. Oh, and most states won’t allow her to get a license until 18 unless she is in school. Hooray for fads and stupid kids!

    -fin
    Thales

  16. It’s amazing how fully so many people have bought into the myth that you must have a college degree to be capable of being successful. Contrary to popular belief structured “official” education has little to do with how successful you are capable of becoming. If you have a PhD and no desire to succeed you will go no-where, and as this girl has shown, if you do not even have a high-school diploma it is still quite possible to be very successful.

    “Who cares though, seriously. We need ditch-diggers and fry-cooks so, yeah, let her remain an ignorant kid. “? “First of all…she should have stayed in school and completed her education….she could get a degree in web design..and be even more successful…sound like she let the money go to her head…and thinks she don’t need any education to be successful, but that won’t last forever…nothing ever does especially in today technial world.”?

    Simple question then, how many of you who are disparaging her “lack of education” and deriding her make anywhere near as much as her? Even better yet, how many of you actually use any degrees you have? Most of the people I know who have degrees are not actually in a business that makes use of what the degree focused on.

    Good luck though, if you follow the prescribed path and go straight to college from high-school, like everyone else, then you will end up where everyone else does: in a job you hate, making less money in a year then this 17 year old high-school drop-out makes in a month.

  17. Wow. Recently I’ve been deciding to run a network of site as well. And Currently working on a new concept. I’ve read stuffs on a we webmaster’s forum about their earnings and how it’s suppose to be hard. But Now I’m more inspired. T_T I’ll work harder!

  18. Her site doesn’t show up in the top 10 results of google for any of the keywords on her home page.

    So where does the traffic come from? Yahoo….

  19. I have to agree with “z 29y/old fart”, minus the “nigger” parts. I’m MORE than 29 years old and I feel the same way when he says: “This makes me want to f*cking kill myself when I see people half my age -in a flash of luck- succeeding. Jealousy? You bet.”

    Same here. I too am jealous, and bitter, and jealous, and bitter again. I had quite the head start on that litte girl when it came to graphics design and website building, yet I have not made any money from it, much less millions. Yeah, I have put alot of work into what I did, but it has not translated into dollars no matter how hard I tried. My life is crap, my childhood was crap. And I cant stand stories like these. Yeah, I wish I could pump my fist in the air, and go “Yeah! Good for you Ashley!” But I cant. If my life was any good, if I was content, if I had some money in the bank, if I had a decent roof over my head, I could. But I cant. When you’re a failure in life, when no matter how hard you work, how hard you try, you’re still living in poverty, you’re still living a shitty life, its hard to read success stories like Ashley’s and not have thoughts of putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger. Damn it, I had quite a few years head start ahead of Ashley, and out of the blue she starts her own website, and only a few months later begins collecting checks worth thousands of dollars month after month. She now earns more money in one month than I have in the past ten years. Where was I three years back when Ashley got started at 14? I was working in an office building as a janitor, scrubbing toilets, for little more than minimum wage. Where am I now? I lost that job, and am on food stamps. All the while, I tried to make a few bucks over the internet, but it all came to nothing. And I’m supposed to be happy for Ashley? Screw that.

    “z” goes on to say:

    “All she needs to know is, she does not know how lucky she really is to have that loving family and people of her own kind surrounding and supporting her.”

    Amen. My family was dysfunctional to the nth degree. I was beaten and cursed at by my own mother. Whenever I wanted to try to do something with my life, she was the first one to stop me. No support. No love.

    “ding dong” says:

    “If you have anythin else than beans between your ears – GO OUT THERE AND BECOME SOMETHING!!!!”

    You are an idiot. It isnt that easy. Thats what I’ve been doing for the past ten plus years, and what has it got me? Nothing. Looking at Ashley’s story and claiming its as easy for you as it was for her if you just work at it is a big fat lie. Look at the statistics. Wealthy people represent about 2-3 percent of the population. If it is easy for the rest of us as it was for Ashley to get even half of the money she has got now, then 98 percent of the population should be made up of nothing but millionaires, instead of 2-3 percent. Yeah, she did work for it. She did earn it, but luck also DOES play a factor in who gets to be rich. I worked my butt off alot harder and alot longer than Ashley ever did, but what have I got to show for it? Nothing. I still hold out for the hope that maybe someday I will strike it rich so that I could buy a nice home, never have to do a dirty job for little more than minimum wage, be my own boss instead of taking all sorts of abuse from supervisors, etc. But for now my life is shit. And stories like Ashley’s only serves to remind me of that fact and depresses me as a result. I HATE stories like this.

  20. Hooper writes: “Hey is she can do it we all can”

    Bull. While it’s true that anyone can learn how to do graphics and website building like she did, not anyone can make millions doing it like she did. Only a select lucky few get to earn that kind of money doing this. Ashley is one of those few lucky ones.

    If it were true that “if she can do it, we all can”, then we’d all be millionaires. Multi-millionaires. There’d be no such thing as poor or middle class people.

  21. You know she got lucky. There are very good reasons why this happens so rarely. There are people who are better than her at what she does, but without the same success.

  22. From what I’ve learned about Ashley is that, despite what these puff pieces about her would lead you to believe, her success can be credited to sheer dumb luck. Not to any business acumen. Quite frankly, reading stories treating her like she’s some sort of financial business wizard is making me sick.

    Yes, she worked hard on her designs, yes they are nice ones too. But it was luck that got her wealth. There are thousands of sites out there that have provided myspace layouts for free as well. Out of all of them (many of which are better designed), it was hers that most people chose to gravitate towards, not because she convinced them to, or because her designs are better, but because it just happened that way. Out of all of them, only one was bound to be the most favored one, and Ashley’s was it. She lucked out.

    This started out as a fun hobby for her (you can see previous incarnations of her site through http://www.archive.org). She was not even thinking of making money, much less millions, this way. She was using the services of a hosting company, the cheapest account they offered, that allotted her only a certain amount of space for her website. When all the hits were coming in, combined with all of the layouts she was creating and uploading, they were eating up her precious bandwith. She was unable to pay for all the additional bandwith, so the hosting company rep suggested to her that she put up a google adsense advert on her site in order to help her pay for it. She did that, and all those hits was translated into big bucks, much to her shock. This may sound like sour grapes, maybe it is, but she is no business genius. She did not plan this from the start. She is just a VERY lucky girl. I regard her “success” not much different than from the success of becoming a lottery winner. No one plans to become a lottery winner. One just lucks into it, same way Ashley lucked into her millions.

  23. I wrote: “Out of all of them (many of which are better designed), it was hers that most people chose to gravitate towards, not because she convinced them to, or because her designs are better, but because it just happened that way. Out of all of them, only one was bound to be the most favored one, and Ashley’s was it.”

    I must say that I found out that while Ashley’s site is indeed bringing in alot of visits/hits, out of all the websites out there that offer free myspace layouts, hers is not on top. Hers is not the most favored one. There are quite a few that get more hits than hers. She just managed to get enough hits to earn the money she does. Quite a few freebie myspace layout sites get many more hits than hers. Ashley and her site. and the money she earned, got alot of attention because of her young age.

  24. Hi Zakk,

    I’m curious where you got the idea that Adsense had a cap. According to John Chow (johnchow.com) the guy who runs plenty of fish makes over $240,000 a month through Adsense. I don’t think that there is a cap.

  25. Boy what a bunch of weak whiny wanna be’s.

    Thomas, thanks for a great story. I’m writing a post about internet scams, and wanted to use Ashley’s story as a counterpoint to sites that just try to scam people.

    I find it distressing that a Judge has stepped in to appoint a conservator over her money. What prompted the court to do this? Was it the magazine article or some nosy trouble maker who doesn’t think that a 17 year old girl has any business making this kind of money.

    Speaking of which… I’m sure that there was a bit of luck to Ashley’s success, but you’ve got to give her some credit. She began her website because she had a passion and a talent for creating myspace layouts that other people seemed to like. Every time someone uses one of her layouts there is a link back to her website. Get enough layouts out there on myspace and you don’t need to be high on Google or Yahoo to drive traffic.

    For the past six months I’ve been studying web marketing like crazy. I would love to be able to make a living off of the web, but I can tell you there are three things that I’ve learned about web marketing.
    1. It’s not a get rich quick deal. You’ve got to work at it, and Ashley does.
    2. A little bit of Vision goes a long way. Ashley began early and saw that others would want to have their myspace pages customized. She capitalized on that little bit of vision to great success.
    3. The people who are making the most money on the internet didn’t set out to make money. They set out to help people. Ashley seems to have done just that.

    As to her layouts not being the best… Well, MacDonald’s doesn’t make the best hamburgers either, but they sure do sell a lot more than most other hamburger stands.

    As for as her education goes, this girl is never going to work for anyone else a day in her life. She was smart enough to figure out myspace. When the myspace thing isn’t working anymore I’ll bet good money that she’ll have already spotted the next trend and be helping people figure that one out. If you look her up in 10 years I’d also be willing to bet that she’ll have much more of an education than most of you yahoos putting her down because of dropping out of school. What have you done for yourselves? Where are your websites and your brilliant ideas? Of course she was lucky. She was lucky that myspace came around. She was lucky that she understood it. She was lucky to have access to a computer. But, she made her own luck by creating the layouts. How many of you even have a blog? What are you doing to try to help people? Where are you putting your passion?

    Ashley deserves every penny that her space creates for her. It’s her money! She made it, and no-one has a right to put her down because of it!

  26. Yeah, I am a weak, whiny wanna be. When life has dealt you a bad hand, when you’re a complete and total loser, reading about something like Ashley’s success doesnt help.

    “What have you done for yourselves? Where are your websites and your brilliant ideas? Of course she was lucky. She was lucky that myspace came around. She was lucky that she understood it. She was lucky to have access to a computer. But, she made her own luck by creating the layouts. How many of you even have a blog? What are you doing to try to help people? Where are you putting your passion? ”

    SOME of us have worked longer and harder on our passions than Ashley (in my case, more than half her young lifetime) and have little or nothing to show for it.

    “It’s not a get rich quick deal. You’ve got to work at it,”

    Yeah, but Ashley got her first monthly check (2700 bucks, the next one 5 grand, the next one ten thousand) only a few months after she started her website. She got rich quick.

    “Ashley deserves every penny that her space creates for her. It’s her money!”

    No one denies that. And DON’T get me wrong, I dont begrudge Ashley her success. I just wish that kind of success would come my way for once in my life.

    “She made it, and no-one has a right to put her down because of it!”

    Actually, we do have the right 🙂

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