You Are The Worst dot Com

Here is an inspiration video and textbook example showing the true potential of entrepreneurship on the Internet. While most teens her age are going to school studying hard with the hopes of entering a good university and eventually becoming corporate slaves, 17 year-old Ashley Qualls started making MySpace templates for her friends and in turn successfully developed her site, Whateverlife.com, into a multi-million dollar business.

From her basement office, she has made Whateverlife.com a destination for millions of teenage girls who spend countless hours interacting on the site. In less than two years since Whateverlife.com 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 for $1.5 million and a car of her choice. Developing and growing the business is hard but try being 17 while learning how to be the boss of her mother, her friends, and developers-for-hire in India.

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 free and her main stream of revenue comes from advertisements.

According to Google Analytics, Whateverlife.com attracts more than 7 million individuals, 60 million page views a month and over 250 thousand hits a day. Although Web-site rankings vary with the methodology, a popular source among advertisers, Quantcast, ranked Whateverlife.com at a staggering No. 349 in mid-July out of more than 20 million sites. Among the sites in its rearview mirror were Britannica.com, AmericanIdol.com, FDA .gov, and CBS.com.

Here is a recent CNN Video Feature interviewing the teen on her successful business which also indicates that she will be appearing next week on the hugely popular daytime talk show, The View.

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The Federal Reserve’s interest rate 50 basis point decision drop has come and gone and even though the impact on the financial markets has been substantial, many are pondering how will this affect fellow Canadians and Americans traveling north of the boarder? The past week has marked various milestones in the global markets:

• The U.S. Dollar has plummeted to an all-time low against the Euro by breaking through the key 1.40 barrier.
• The Canadian Loonie approached parity with the U.S. currency for the first time in 31 years.
• Gold has hit a 28-year high as dollar sinks reaching $735.85 today, with the likelihood of $800 by years-end a favourable outcome.
• Crude Oil is hovering below record highs after U.S. inventories fell more than expected and as the threat of a storm gathering near Florida reignited supply concerns.

The Canadian Case:

The loonie, which has been gaining on its American counterpart since bottoming out below 62 cents in early 2002, has recently been on a spectacular run, up from 95 cents at the start of September and from under 90 cents last spring and its recent ascent is mainly caused by the surprised large cut in interest rates. Soaring demand for Canadian commodities, ranging from oil and wheat to coal, gold, nickel and zinc – have helped propel the currency, while a weakening American economy has dragged down the greenback, the world’s most widely held and traded currency.

Advantages:

The high dollar may make U.S.-made goods cheaper to buy in Canada due to the rise in purchasing power and is a boon to Canadians traveling in the United States, especially cross-border shoppers and those looking to book winter vacations to Florida or Arizona. Those trips are suddenly much cheaper than they were a month ago. On the other side of that, importers will also win big as the costs of bringing goods into Canada gets cheaper, as will whole sellers – the “middle men” in the economy.

Negatives:

But the high loonie will continue to put pressure on domestic manufacturers, who have to try to sell goods south of the border at a discount or have been priced out of U.S. markets. Manufacturers such as lumber exporters, which have not had some insulation from commodity prices, and automakers will be particularly hard-hit, as the rising Canadian dollar makes exports less competitive at the same time that the shrinking U.S. housing market is making demand for housing weak. Tourism in Canada could also be affected, as travel to Canada becomes more expensive to Americans – a drop that will likely ripple through the hospitality industry. While the manufacturing sector has lost 289,000 jobs since late 2002, the economy has created more than one million jobs in resources, construction, services, health care, education and financial industries, leaving the national jobless rate at 30-year lows.

Forecast:

With only two more Federal Reserve rate decisions on the calendar, we expect 25bp rate cuts in October and December with another half point cut may not be entirely out of the question if economic data remains weak. This spells trouble for the U.S. currency however we are heading into unchartered waters with records being posted galore so we must proceed with caution even though the U.S. economy and currency look to be in the brink of disaster. The Canadian currency will definitely trade at a premium by years-end and, possibly sooner than expected; consumers will be in joy for the upcoming x-mas season.

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Recently D.E.A agents raided a home of Meth dealers in suburban Mexico and discovered $207 million cash piled in a back bedroom. It was the largest seizure in history and is really amazing to see.

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Have you ever asked yourself that question? I didn’t until I stumbled upon other blogs which had this banner posted on their site specifically displaying the net worth of their blog. Nowadays you hear about major multinationals buying sites for millions and billions of (i.e. Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion), it makes you wonder what fraction of that could you possibly make (just for shits and giggles, of course).

You too can value your blog by clicking here.

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Today’s post is dedicated to a social network, similar to MySpace but also has the potential to get you paid. The concept is pretty much the same, you meet new, people, new people meet you, etc. however where it really sets it apart from MySpace is that you make money just by “using” it and if you refer people to Yuwie and they refer people to Yuwie and your pages in turn generate a ton of traffic, you can make money. Yuwie pays its members by sharing a portion of it’s ad revenue with it’s members to a certain extent.

The payout are as follows:

LEVELS - REFERRALS - PAGEVIEWS - EARNINGS
1—————3—————3,000—————$0.15
2—————9—————9,000—————$0.45
3—————27————-27,000————–$0.54
4—————81————-81,000————–$1.62
5—————243———–243,000————-$4.86
6—————729———–729,000————-$14.58
7————–2,187——–2,187,000————-$43.74
8————–6,561——–6,561,000————-$328.05
9————-19,683——19,683,000————-$984.15
10————59,049——59,049,000————-$8,857.35

TOTAL——88,572 —–88,572,000————$10,235.49

Although the site is brand new and the concept isn’t a new thing, new sign ups don’t have much to lose by checking the site out as a case study for their own future sites as I don’t see how you can make a lot of money from this especially competing with social giants: FaceBook and MySpace. You can view the site by clicking here.

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