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 cheques 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 do not following that many accounts aren’t flooded with UberFacts,” he said.
Sanchez’s facts tend to be just unbelievable – or gross – enough to warrant a share.
Last year, BuzzFeed published a piece criticising 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.”
Earlier this year, DailyEdge.ie also carried out its own experiment to see if it could debunk 9 Uberfacts. Here’s what happened.
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