How a 23-year-old makes $500,000 a year tweeting random facts on twitter
Kris Sanchez and his UberFacts team
When Kris
Sanchez joined Twitter in 2009, he didn’t expect much to come of it.
“I really
started my Twitter account because I wanted to follow Britney Spears,” Sanchez
told Business Insider. “I’m a huge fan.”
He found he
didn’t have much to tweet about in his daily life, so he started sharing random
facts he found while procrastinating on the internet.
He obviously
had a knack for it.
“By 2011, I
had decided to start tweeting 24/7. So that’s a fact every 15 minutes,” he
said.
And thus, UberFacts was born.
In 2012, he
hit 200,000 followers, including some big names, like Paris Hilton and Khloe
Kardashian. Not much later, an ad network reached out.
“They helped
me see how I could actually make money off of UberFacts, by building galleries
and tweeting links,” Sanchez said. “I was getting checks of $600 or $800 a
week, and I couldn’t believe it.”
Today,
Sanchez’s Twitter account has
an astounding 9.4 million followers. The Facebook page has more than 1.27
million likes, and the Instagram
account has more than 468,000 followers.
He makes
about $500,000 a year on UberFacts.
He recently
launched an UberFacts app, which is projected to eventually bring in an
additional $60,000 a week. The app allows users to like and comment on facts
and share them with their friends.
Sanchez also
recently hired two people to help him look up facts and schedule tweets for the
day. They generally tweet between two and four facts from the account each
hour.
“That’s what
we decided works so that people who aren’t following that many accounts aren’t
flooded with UberFacts,” he said.
Sanchez’s
facts tend to be just unbelievable enough to warrant a share.
Last
year BuzzFeed
published a piece criticizing Sanchez for tweeting questionable or
incorrect facts.
But Sanchez
defends his strategy for verifying the facts he tweets.
“We make
sure that we can find multiple sources for each fact,” he said. “Sometimes we
make mistakes. Sometimes other sites make mistakes, or one site says
something’s true and the other says it’s not. Having a team helps with that.”
Sanchez
tweets full time, but he hopes to one day get into TV production or write a
book. For now, he’s working on expanding the brand’s reach.
“I never
expected it would be my full-time job,” he said. “I’ve always enjoyed
entertaining people. I’m hoping that the brand brings a different kind of value
to the Internet. If these tweets can make people think, I think it does that.”
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