How One 17-Year-Old Earned a Million Dollars

Ashley, age 17, and her family struggled with financial issues growing up, often moving from one small apartment to another. At age 9, she would often start messing around with her cousin's computer. One day, her cousin taught her how to make a website including CSS, HTML, and Photoshop. She loved it! Soon enough, she started making graphics in her free time and as a hobby. She started out making simple patterns, using, for example, stripes and hearts. Around 2005, everyone had a Myspace, so once her friends saw her amazing designs, they started asking her to make them some cool Myspace layouts for their profiles.

The word spread pretty fast about her cool designs, and people started looking at her blog, where she kept her designs, and asking her how to make their own blogs! All of her graphics were given out to people for free, and she added things to help users understand how to use her graphics. In about a couple of months, Ashley was getting tons of hits on her site! About 100 visitors a day! One of her friends mentioned she should sign up for Google AdSense (google.com/adsense) ,a system powered by Google to put ads on your site, and it pays you when someone clicks on the ads.

Ashley decided to call her blog / website Whateverlife.com. She came up with this one day when she was playing a game on her Nintendo with a friend, and when she lost, the screen read "Whatever ...that's life". This made her want to name her site, Whateverlife.com.

Two months later, Ashley received her first payment from Google. Wow! The check read $2,700! To her, this meant like a TON of money! She had never had an actual job, so she always had to ask her parents when she needed money. It was like a major shock to receive so much money. And especially all at once! Her mom even questioned her and was worried for Ashley if she was actually getting paid for all her hard work.