Paparazzi have their lenses on Miley Cyrus

Anywhere from $30,000to $150,000, depending on which paparazzo you ask. A photo's price could be higher if her designated love object happened to be camera-worthy like a Jonas brother, or Shia LeBeouf, not just some cute Kevin Federline-esque wannabe.

Yes, the paps have discovered the "Hannah Montana" star, forming a scrum of ferocious men-dogs who camp outside her North Hollywood home. They follow her shopping at the Malibu shops, lurk around her lunch spots, accompany her to church, riding her bike, and then pop up again down in Nashville, where's she's recently gone to shoot the "Hannah Montana" movie. No one in the Cyrus camp (not Miley, pa Billy Ray Cyrus, her publicist, or her agent) would comment, though one person close to the star notes that the phenomenon started around February, when Cyrus returned to Los Angeles after finishing her world tour.

Let's repeat one salient fact about Miley: She's all of 15.

She can't drink, drive or serve her country, but she can provide a profitable stream of income to those devoted to chronicling her every move?

Every milestone in her young life is going to have some fairly concrete monetized value -- if the photographer can get the shot. But will all the attention ultimately corrode the very wholesomeness that makes Miley so popular? It doesn't appear that the 24/7 spotlight has helped the mental health of such fore-gals as Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears.

Indeed, it's their unseemly public antics that have stoked the appetite for Miley, the paragon of Disney-branded civility and niceness.

"She's much more attractive than Britney Spears," says Frank Griffin of the Bauer-Griffin paparazzi agency. "It's much more of a success story. [Consumers] want to see success. They don't want to see failure. If someone famous falls on their face, you have to report it . . . but Miley is going to steal all of Britney's thunder. Kids want to see her. They don't want to see ripped fishnets and fear and mascara-streaked cheeks."

"I think one of the reasons she's so popular is after all the train wreck girls, the Britneys, there's a move toward all-American clean living," says Gary Morgan, CEO of Splash News, another paparazzi behemoth. "Everyone is looking for a moral teenager, someone they can look up to."