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Profitable Niche Opportunities in Social Networking Sites (MySpace)

Social networking sites are all the rage today. According to web measurement firm Hitwise , MySpace.com alone received 72.73 percent of the market share of U.S. visits in May 2008 among a custom category of 58 of the leading social networking websites commands 73.82% of all social networking traffic (as of May 2008).

With the enormous traffic these social networking sites receive, there is a huge opportunity for other online businesses to develop business models that revolve around these massive social networking sites.

One entrepreneur who saw this opportunity is Ashley Qualls. Ashley founded WhateverLife.com in 2004 at the age of 14 when friends and others clamored for custom MySpace layouts. WhateverLife.com was created to showcase the graphics, pictures, backgrounds, layouts, and skins she has developed for MySpace, which are all free for the taking.

Ashley does not create the best graphics in the world – but she creates the graphics that speaks to her target audience. As a teenager herself, her success stems from her unique understanding of her core audience – young teenage girls.

And boy, what a large audience this is. FastCompany magazine reports that her site gets 7 million individuals and 60 million page views a month. Given the massive amount of traffic, WhateverLife.com reportedly earns more than $70K a month from advertising, such as popups and Adsense ads.

Not bad for a kid who simply wanted to create cool graphics for her MySpace page.