By Taylor Maloch
Social Media Editor
“I make $800-$1,000 [each week],” junior Jerry Silvestri said, explaining how much money advertisers pay him to tweet.
Silvestri owns three popular anonymous accounts on Twitter with thousands of followers. He spends about 30 minutes to an hour each day managing the accounts and making sure they are updated. He spends some of the money he makes, but also saves for college.
“At first I took all the money that I made and put it back into my account so I could get more followers, but now I just spend it on clothes,” Silvestri said.
Almost two years ago, Silvestri was scrolling through his Twitter list when he discovered a website that was being paid to post funny pictures. After researching how this was possible, Silvestri decided to test it out for himself. Using the money he saved from working with his dad over the summer, Silvestri started his own anonymous account on Twitter. He then paid other Twitter accounts with a lot of followers to promote his account. Once he reached 50,000 followers, he could sign up for Google Adsense, a website with advertisers who would pay him for tweeting what they wanted.
“You have to trade with other accounts to get a bigger audience; say I know an account that has 150,000 followers, I would say, ‘Hey if you retweet three of my tweets, I’ll do the same for you,’” Silvestri said. “So you’re engaging other people’s accounts and getting your tweets out to a good amount of people.”
With his first account “Unlucky Brian” becoming popular, Silvestri said it “motivated him to keep on going, try to get more followers and make more money.” He sold this first account for $4,000 and created another account called “topinventionss.” This account tweets pictures of creative inventions, such as a trampoline bridge or a waterslide in a closet. It has over 243,000 followers and is growing each day. Silvestri has bought and sold others, including his current account “truckp0rn,” which only tweets pictures of different types of trucks. This account, for truck fans, has over 107,000 followers. Silvestri recently bought his third anonymous account called “chiliesttweets” which has over 134,000 followers.
“A lot of people know you’re making money from this and they don’t like that, but if you keep it relevant to what your account is about, then you get more money from it,” Silvestri said.
When Silvestri started his first account, he ended up losing $800 dollars to advertisers who said they would promote his account if he paid them.
“When I first got started I was trying to get people that would promote my account,” Silvestri said. “I ran into someone who ended up taking my money and didn’t give me anything, so I lost $500 and I did it again and lost $300… after that I found good people.”
