There has been a niche industry of building up and selling off social media accounts for years now. It can take a lot of work, and it takes some pretty high legitimate follower accounts to attract real money these days, but it is something that can be done as a source of online income.
This post is meant to be a very basic introduction to the process.
How Does the Business Work?
The most straightforward buyer for a social media account is someone who plans to monetize it with their own ads, or use it to drive traffic to a related website or business. That latter category could include pumping their own existing social media accounts up by linking to them (i.e. linking their YouTube videos on the account they buy from you).
Buyers may also be speculating on usernames that may be wanted by a big company in the future, as has been done since forever with domain names. Any company worth their salt will immediately register their name with all the big services, but there is still room for speculation in individual brands (i.e. personal names and nicknames) or for individual products from a brand that suddenly blow up (think the sudden craze for the Stanley 1913 Quencher thermos).
If You Grow An Account to Have Substantial Traffic, Why Not Just Sell Ads Yourself?
That's certainly a good way to make money, under the right circumstances accounts with even just a modest following can pull in hundreds per month (and big accounts are well into the thousands per month in earnings potential).
It's also a lot of work, though. Generally speaking, accounts have to be updated regularly (at least three times a day) or engagement starts ebbing right away. That means constantly generating or finding new content, unless you're paying someone to manage the account and/or create things for it, which of course will eat into your profits. There is literally only enough time in the day to manage *maybe* several accounts in this way, and that's if you make it your sole full-time occupation.
Selling an account is basically cashing out the labor of that sort that you've put in so far for a lump sum.
What Kind of Money Do These Accounts Make?
The earnings potential of an account, and thus the price it can command, depends to a great deal on what its focus/subject matter is.
For example, jokey meme accounts are pretty easy to build up by stealing content from somewhere else (often from a "no no" site that most normal people don't go to like 4Chan), but also offer extremely limited possibility for really lucrative monetization (content that advertisers don't want to be associated with, always flirting with bans and algorithm shadowbanning, etc). People have also done well with stealing "cute animal" content from all over the place in this way, but that niche is hyper-saturated at this point.
The most lucrative niches are those where people are ready to make big purchases or money movements and are shopping for info: finance, travel, health and fitness, and luxury goods are just a few of the biggest examples.
There isn't a hard-and-fast system for valuing social media accounts, but there are some general rules of thumb for estimating. The amount of regular engagement is worth more than the amount of followers; that can go as high as a dollar-per-regular-interaction rate depending on the type of account. For more middling engagement accounts that will probably be fixer-uppers rather than turnkey, a more standard pricing is somewhere between half a penny to a penny per legitimate follower (so like $1,000 for a 100,000 follower account, presuming it can be verified the vast majority are not bots and will at least sometimes engage).
What's the Standard Payment System for Transactions?
PayPal is pretty much an "industry standard" because of its buyer and seller protections. If you go through a particular site that caters to transactions, they may have their own escrow service.
Both will involve fees, but people generally eat the fees for the added security. Some people try to do the PayPal "friends and family" option to avoid paying fees, but this strips nearly all of the transaction protections and could easily be abused by a scammer. Any "grey market" space like this is absolutely rife with scammers, so paying a little extra for security is very wise.
Where Are Accounts Sold?
The best action tends to be in private group chats on encrypted messaging services like Telegram, GroupMe and Signal, where things work more smoothly because it's a smaller community and people know each other. These also generally involve getting to know people and asking for invites, however. These people also generally have a more public presence on sites like Twitter, Instagram and so on, where you interact and demonstrate your intentions. You'll have to sniff all that out for yourself though, I can't link direct to anyone (please don't ask).
There are some sites that specialize as middlemen, but these often have high requirements for selling accounts. This is not an endorsement of any of these sites, just a list of those that have been around for years and are known quantities (may have a rough/hacker crowd hanging about but the platform itself is generally legit and viable for transactions):
* Viral Accounts (minimum 50k to 100k followers for most account types)
* FameSwap
* PlayerUp (also does online game accounts)
* BlackHatWorld forums (some level of screening of sellers but not much for buyers, caveat emptor)
How Do You Analyze an Account to Determine Legitimate Traffic / Value?
Raw follower numbers are easy to fake, easier on some platforms than others. On Twitter, if you just post the right keywords fake women bots will flock to follow you. Same with crypto and other types of scammers.
A lot of it is just eyeball test, looking to see if posts regularly get the engagement you would expect given the follower numbers. Are people commenting and sharing? Do the comments look legitimate?
There are assorted third party tools like SocialBlade that also expand on and break down what you're normally able to see through each platform's own interface.
Is There Anything Illegal About This?
Selling and flipping social media accounts isn't illegal, unless you live somewhere with some very unusual laws. But it is pretty regularly against the terms of service (TOS) of the platform you're using. That means you could get the account banned if they get wind of it being sold.
That said, there isn't much these platforms can do if it isn't made very public and obvious that the account was sold (like mentioning it on the account itself). They also probably won't care enough to take action if the account does not go on to be used for illegal or further TOS-violating activity.
No comments:
Post a Comment