This 23-Year-Old Makes $500,000 A Year On Twitter Tweeting Out Facts
No, we're not talking about handling a company's social media. We're talking big bucks, hundreds of thousands of dollars, just for typing a few characters, adding a link, and clicking "send."
That's the business 23-year-old Kris Sanchez, who tweets under the account @UberFacts, a Twitter account that tweets - you guessed it - facts, to 7.2 million followers.
Last year, he made $500,000 for tweeting sponsored links, according to Fast Company. The links, when clicked by his followers, earn him between $.01-.03/click. Multiply that by a few sponsored links a day, a couple of hundred thousand eager followers, and 365 days in the year, and you're rolling in money.
There's also an UberFacts app, which reportedly brings in $60,000 a week in ad revenue. Sanchez tweets 60-70 times a day.
Fast Company profiled Sanchez, a New Yorker who left college (SUNY New Paltz) after a year, and explained how the sponsored links works:
The way this works is that a company called Social Reactor, which pairs social media influencers with advertisers, supplies him with galleries or other web pages that he links to in his Tweets. He gets paid for every click those pages receive. Then there are the branded deals he's done with companies like Ford and Paramount, wherein a simple tweet, accompanied by a link and a hashtag, becomes a virtual slot machine, gushing out thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.
But Sanchez, like so many others when they join a social network, never imagined he would be making a living off of something that others do for free.
"I joined Twitter to follow Britney Spears" he told Fast Company. "But I didn't have anything to tweet about. So I figured, hey, tweeting these facts would be a really good idea. It was just so I could feel like I was closer to her."