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Tag: Reddit

Paying In T-Shirts

In 2010, when I was focusing all my energies on a top 10 lists blog, I met someone on the internet who was very good with viral content creation. He lived in the bay area and ran many high volume sites.

While he didn’t really have any interest in wanting to work with me because he was doing quite well, he agreed to write a few posts for my blog on a rev-share basis because of our friendship. I assured him that I will make my best efforts to market the posts on digg and reddit but failed to get his articles viral. In the end, I ended up owing him some pocket-change with no way to pay the money to him because of unavailability of PayPal.

I was up and coming in the business, still trying to learn my way through it. I didn’t know many people. I had a friend who would receive PayPal payments for me in the UK, but he maintained no balance for me at that time and I didn’t receive any payments in the following weeks either.

While my friend didn’t really need the pocket-change, he did mention once or twice that there’s still nothing in his PayPal.

After I was let down by the likes of Western Union which didn’t allow sending money to anyone with a non-Pakistani name, I concluded that the most cost effective way of sending $15 to US is by shipping him a T-Shirt from the US and paying for it with my debit card.

I went to Threadless.com, and shipped him a cheesy T-Shirt.

Riding Along The Wave

Forbes is double-dipping in ad-revenue by publishing about Kylie Jenner. First they made the entire world read the headlines that Kylie is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.

Months later they published that Kylie and her family lied about her billionaire status and that she is not yet a billionaire. Instead, she’s worth only 900 million.

I don’t know about you, but I see no difference in being a billionaire or being worth 900 million. If she’s worth 900 million, she will be a billionaire in 1 or 2 years.

Instead I thought of something else when I read the news. I thought that an instagram influencer is (nearly) worth a billion dollars. She’s built this empire using Instagram, a Shopify store, and by private labeling products.

I also thought that Facebook only paid a billion dollars for Instagram while today an Instagram influencer is worth a billion dollars.

I also thought about TikTok posting 17 billion dollars in revenue in 2019 and over 3 billion dollars in profits. And the fact that they have over 1.5 billion monthly active users, more than Instagram as well as Snapchat.

I thought about gaming influencers/streamers who are making tens of millions of dollars per month using Twitch, YouTube, etc.

I thought about influencer marketing. I thought about riding along the wave of a powerful platform such as TikTok.

And I thought how being early in riding that wave can make you a millionaire or even a billionaire.

I have known, met or spoken to 100s of influencers till date who were early in riding the wave on Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok etc. I know a large majority of them are worth at least hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you saw a platform taking off, figured it early, and cringed instead of taking advantage, it was your loss and it will continue to be.

Zeeshan, YouTube & Beyond

I met Zeeshan aka ZSM nearly 10 years ago. I met him after reading this article. He just had his 100th story get on Digg’s front-page which was a very big deal for me since I hadn’t had my first at that point. For people who joined social media later, Digg was like Reddit, only bigger.

To put things in numbers, 1 story getting popular on Digg would roughly mean 50,000 unique visits. 100 popular stories would approximately mean 5,000,000 visits. Assuming an RPM of $5, which is quite low, this should have generated $25,000. In 2008. By a 17 year old. Before Facebook, Twitter & YouTube were a thing.

Zeeshan also happens to have a rare disability called ‘rickets’ that has caused deformation to almost all the bones in his body. But I’ve found him more ‘able’ than most other people I know, including me. Since he doesn’t talk a lot about his disability anymore, I’m not going to do any further talking either.

Zeeshan’s story is extra-ordinary. What he achieved was special. Way more special than what anyone else I know achieved. But Zeeshan in the last couple of years, was very ordinary. He was ordinary because like most successful people, he had found his comfort-zone. He seeked happiness in things outside of work, which I completely understand. But once you do that long enough, you become very ordinary. And somehow, I feel special people shouldn’t be ordinary. They can be ordinary for themselves, but not for the rest of the world. And the world deserves to see more of Zeeshan.

Today, I think would be the first day of that happening. Zeeshan has just started his YouTube vlog. His challenge to himself is 1 vlog a day for at least next 365 days.

My predictions for his YouTube channel are below.

  • He will cross minimum 250,000 subscribers before year ends, without a Rupee in ad-spend.
  • He will have minimum 10,000,000 views before the year ends.
  • At least 1 of his videos will hit 1 million views. There’s a 50% probability that this will happen. But if he gets married in last quarter of 2020, there’s a 95% probability of this happening.
  • All these predictions will only come true if he completes 365-day challenge.

I’ve recently developed a habit of making public predictions. They can be embarrassing if you’re awfully off. But they are fun and challenging. They also improve my chances of predicting better in the long run.

Anyway, if you’re interested in more of Zeeshan, here’s his first Vlog.