It's A Girl Thing: Tween Queens and the Commodification of the Girl's Tween Market

A few years of research, thoughts and adjustments that all led to a completed film which, framed by the structure of a faux interactive website for tween girls, looks closely, and critically, at the tween market's evolution and the role of Disney and Nickelodeon's tween queens (Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Britney Spears, Hilary Duff, Miley Cryus, Miranda Cosgrove, Kiki Palmer, Selena Gomez, and more) in the market's explosion.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Those Teen Millionaires...They'll Get You Everytime.


From Yahoo News, By KEVIN SITES (click title above to link to full story)

Not so long ago, teen Ashley Qualls lived in a one-bedroom apartment with her mom and sister. But with her computer and savvy business sense she made a better life for all of them.


Ashley Qualls doesn't sound like a typical high school student. Maybe that's because the 17-year-old is the CEO of a million-dollar business.

Ashley is the head of whateverlife.com, a website she started when she was just 14 — with eight dollars borrowed from her mother. Now, just three years later, the website grosses more than $1 million a year, providing Ashley and her working class family a sense of security they had never really known.

This teenage CEO bought her family a 4-bedroom house and built herself an office in the basement.
It all started with capitalism 101, the law of supply and demand. Ashley became interested in graphic design just as the online social networking craze began to catch fire.

When she saw her friends personalizing their MySpace pages, she began creating and giving away MySpace background designs through Whateverlife. The designs are cheery, colorful and whimsical, with lots of hearts, Ashley's favorites.
She also pulled quotes from popular songs and built backgrounds around those themes. "Teenage girls love quotes," Ashley says, scrolling through some of her site's 3,000 designs, more than a third of which she made herself.

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