How To Make $500,000 A Year On Twitter.

Bi Nicole Laporte

Kris Sanched

It gets harder”---tap, tap, tap--“and harder as you go,” he says, staring intently at the sleek appliance. “You have”--tap, tap, tap--“less time.”


Kris Sanchez
It’s a blindingly sunny morning in October, and Sanchez, founder of the uber-popular Twitter account UberFacts, is sitting outside at a sidewalk cafe in Beverly Hills showing me a feature on the about-to-be-released UberFacts Android app. (An iOS app already exists.) He's playing a game called UberTap, in which you try to tap the screen a certain number of times within a certain number of seconds. Say, 80 times in 10 seconds. It’s mindlessly addictive (wait--what about 100 times in 10 seconds?), and has absolutely nothing to do with the weird, Ripley's Believe It Or Not-type trivia that has made UberFacts one of the most powerful brands on Twitter.

“I really want to give people a variety of things to do,” Sanchez says, pushing up the sleeves on his dark green leather jacket to reveal a small tattoo on his wrist that says “wealth and prosperity” in Chinese characters (the other wrist says “love” also in Chinese characters). The 23-year-old former dancer--he studied theater in high school and was among the hundreds of dancers who performed at the Microsoft Kinect launch in 2010 in Times Square--is wearing jeans and purple high-tops. His dark hair is cut in a thick Mohawk, the tips bleached the color of burnt caramel. “I want people to be able to do more than just read facts all day long.”

Of course, the greater public's love of doing just that is what has made Sanchez one of the top 100 influencers on Twitter, as well as one of the richest. By spewing out tens of thousands of the most “unimportant things you’ll never need to know,” as the UberFacts Twitter page cheekily pronounces, Sanchez has accumulated over 7 million followers since launching the account in 2009 when he was a bored college student at SUNY New Paltz. (“Total hippie town, drum circles. I only went there for a year.”)

Today he says he makes about $500,000 a year just from sponsored links. 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. Plus the apps. The iOS app, which has been downloaded 1.5 million times, is estimated to generate $60,000 a week from advertising, though that has not yet been implemented.

Sanchez is a “special breed," according to Scott Jones, the CEO of ChaCha, which owns Social Reactor.

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