Five years ago, Brooklyn teenager Kris Sanchez, an aspiring dancer, created a personal Twitter account for the sole purpose of following his idol, Britney Spears.
Whether the pop star took note is unclear, but plenty of others have.
Sanchez has garnered more than 7 million followers for his @UberFacts account, more than Stephen Colbert, more than the National Football League – even more than the pope.
UberFacts tweets out about 80 factoids a day (“Snakes kill 100,000 people every year”), along with a handful of sponsored tweets that generate about $500,000 annually. His four-month-old app for iPhone is projected to generate $3 million in annual ad revenue. An Android version, due out in the next few weeks, is expected to double that. He’s already turned down a $1 million offer to sell the business. He is 23 years old.
“It blows my mind that this is what I get to do,” a polite, affable Sanchez said over breakfast near his home office in Studio City, wearing a purple T-shirt, black jeans, and flashy Versace sneakers. “I love it.”
The young entrepreneur’s story encapsulates the earning potential of social media, an economy that capitalizes on content possessing the elusive and highly desirable ability to go viral. If individuals can harness viral content into an audience that keeps coming back for more, then they can earn money – and in Sanchez’s case, lots of it.
“Eyeballs have a number associated with them,” said Justin Rezvani, founder and chief executive of Culver City’s theAmplify, an agency that helps brands connect with Instagram “influencers,” active users with at least 50,000 followers.
But Sanchez is not your typical influencer. He has built his clout based on content, not personal fame – an even harder feat. His tweets are viewed 90 million times a day, based on information provided to Sanchez by Twitter, and most of his posts are retweeted between 500 and 1,000 times.
No more hobby
After tweeting for a couple of years solely as a hobby, Sanchez decided to invest $1,000 to promote his account. In 2011, he reached out to noncelebrities on Twitter who had large numbers of followers and offered to pay them $50 or $100 to retweet his facts.
One of those tweets was seen by Paris Hilton. The socialite then retweeted the fact, which actually had to do with her feet, from her personal account.
“After that it blew up and started gaining 100,000 followers a week,” Sanchez recalled.
That got the attention of Indianapolis Web publisher ChaCha Search Inc.
A ChaCha representative reached out to Sanchez when he hit 200,000 followers, in February 2012, and asked him if he had ever thought about monetizing his account.
“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Sanchez said.
Their deal calls for ChaCha to pay Sanchez for tweeting links to its fact-based lists such as “14 of the most extreme body parts in the world,” roughly eight times a day. The amount of money UberFacts gets depends on how many people click the links, which direct readers to pages with ads on them.
In the early days of the deal, that meant about $500 a week. These days, Sanchez’s tweets net him as much as $9,000 a week.
“UberFacts is one of the top 10 most valuable Twitter handles out there,” said Doug Gilmore, ChaCha’s chief information officer. Articles tweeted out by Sanchez have received as many as 10 million page views.
“We would build content that aligned with what his followers liked,” Gilmore added, noting that his company offered Sanchez detailed analytics mined from the various social media accounts of his followers to determine their interests.
“Kris was able to say, ‘Let me tailor my tweets to that audience,’ which allowed his audience to grow,” Gilmore said.
When he hit 600,000 followers, Sanchez started paying Twitter $5,000 a month to promote his tweets, an expense he could handle thanks to the ChaCha contract.
In April, UberFacts launched an iPhone app that doles out even more facts, this time curated by category. The app was downloaded 1 million times in its first 10 days, and now has roughly 1.5 million downloads. The Android version is set to launch shortly.
In coming weeks, app users will start seeing mobile ads for brands including Hotels.com, and others that Sanchez can’t disclose yet. Those promotions will rake in about $3 million a year on the iPhone app alone, according to internal projections, a number that could double once the Android app comes out.
A native New Yorker, Sanchez has developed a strong affinity for his new home since moving here in December.
“I feel like the quality of life out here is just much better,” he said, sipping a mint tea at Le Pain Quotidien on Ventura Boulevard.
“People are nicer,” he added. “I had to get used to that at first.”
Initially, he lived alone in a North Hollywood apartment, but in May he moved into a large, contemporary house owned by his best friend, 25-year-old Niles Hollowell-Dhar, an A-list music composer and producer who’s worked with pop stars such as Robin Thicke and Enrique Iglesias and whose group, the Cataracs, had a No. 1 hit, “Like a G6,” in 2010.
“I just always thought UberFacts was really cool,” Hollowell-Dhar said. “At the time, Kris was interested in maybe doing a little music.”
A musical collaboration has yet to materialize.
The $1.8 million, three-bedroom pad the two share, and which serves as UberFacts’ headquarters, is perched on a hillside above Harvard Westlake School. A sleek swimming pool greets you as you walk into a walled front courtyard. Inside, Buddha statues are almost everywhere inside the multistory house.
On the way to breakfast in his new silver Mercedes C250 sedan (he only recently learned to drive), Sanchez explained the decision to move to the house from his apartment: “I was spending all my time there.”
Hollowell-Dhar is also Sanchez’s business partner and the catalyst behind the UberFacts app.
“It’s always more fun to go into business with your friends,” Hollowell-Dhar said.
The pair met on Twitter and started hanging out whenever the much sought-after producer traveled to New York.
Not only was it Hollowell-Dhar’s idea, but he also put up the $130,000 to hire a development team and produce the finished product. Hollowell-Dhar also brought in two members of his music management team, brothers Carlo and Anthony Fox, to manage the app development process, which took about seven months. Sanchez and Hollowell-Dhar own 85 percent of Uber Unlimited, the entity that owns the app. The Fox brothers own the rest.
Users download the app for free. The co-owners will make money – perhaps millions a year – beginning in a few weeks when they start selling ads within the app. At least that’s the hope.
“We had to do a lot of learning,” Hollowell-Dhar said. “I was totally scared it was going to be a dud, but I really should not have underestimated the weight of Kris’ Twitter account.”
New routines
When the mobile app launched four months ago, the amount of information needed to satisfy demand grew so much that Sanchez couldn’t handle it on his own. He’s now hired three employees, who have dubbed themselves “fact curators,” to help him find content for the Twitter account and app.
After breakfast, Sanchez meets with Anthony Fox and two of the new employees back at the house – part of a daily routine. They crack open their laptops and begin surfing the Internet to find facts for the next day’s posts, which are loaded a day in advance and scheduled to be tweeted automatically at regular intervals. The employees, who work as independent contractors, typically arrive at 10:30 a.m. and leave about 6 p.m., once all the facts have been vetted by Sanchez.
As the group sat around the kitchen table scouring sites like History.com, Futurity.org and TheAtlantic.com, Sanchez stopped to show everyone a viral video featuring the Broadway cast of “The Lion King” delivering an impromptu performance on a New York subway.
But with all the success of UberFacts, one follower is still missing: Britney Spears.
Sanchez said he would still give up the business for a chance to work with his idol.
“Yes, I would,” Sanchez said without hesitation. Though, “I would probably faint.”
