How a 17 Year Old Girl Earns $70K Monthly From Her Website

I came across an interesting story from Connected Internet about a 17 years old Ashley Qualls who earns as much as $70,000 a month from a website that gives away free layout for MySpace.

Most of this income comes from Google AdSense.

So far she has made more than $1 million from her site at Whateverlife.com. Her first AdSense paycheck was $2,790 and she had rejected $1.5 million buyout offer.

Whateverlife attracts more than 7 million unique visitors and 60 million page views a month. That’s a larger audience than the circulations of Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and CosmoGirl! magazines combined.

In contrast, TechCrunch.com gets 4 million page views per month, 15 times less pageviews.

Quantcast, a popular source among advertisers, ranked Whateverlife.com a staggering No. 349 in mid-July out of more than 20 million sites. Among the sites in its rearview mirror: Britannica.com, AmericanIdol.com, FDA .gov, and CBS.com.

What’s interesting is that, she started the business without the support of financial backing from anyone or professional mentors to guide her along the way.

But Ashley had no connections. No business professionals in the family. No rich aunt or uncle. In the working-class community of downriver Detroit, south of downtown and the sprawling Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan, she bounced back and forth between her divorced parents, neither of whom attended college. Her father is a machinist, her mother, until recently, a retail data collector for ACNielsen. “My mom still doesn’t understand how I do it,” Ashley says. To be fair, she did go to her mother for the initial investment: $8 to register the domain name. Ashley still hasn’t spent a dime on advertising.

It all started as a hobby. She began dabbling in Web-site design eight years ago, when she was 9, hogging the family’s Gateway computer in the kitchen all day. When she wasn’t playing games, she was teaching herself the basics of Web design. To which her mother, Linda LaBrecque, responded, “Get off that computer. Now!” For Ashley’s 12th birthday, her mother splurged on an above-ground swimming pool–”just so she’d go outside,” LaBrecque says.

One thing that struck me when I first visited her site was the unconventional navigation scheme. I suppose it’s well suited for the demographic its targeting.

The design has an added advantage in that the ads look as though they are part of the content, which I am sure improves the page click through rates tremendously.

She has dropped out of high school to concentrate on her online business. If you were in her position would you consider dropping out of school (and perhaps forget about going to college/university alltogether) to concentrate on your business?

Read the full story: Girl Power