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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.”
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.
Whoops!
We couldn't find this Tweet
The average fast food customer eats about 12 pubic hairs a year.
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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Would have to disagree. It’s a story about alternative enterprise using social media.
I think it’s pretty relevant and definitely something a tabloid/red top wouldn’t be able to comprehend.
Everything they tweet is taken off the Internet. Is laughable how wrong their tweets can be. They put one clearly photoshopped image of a castle on a rock off a beach, with boats that looked like Thailand and said Dublin Ireland. Which of course was met by uhs and ahs by the commenters.
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