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As Heartless Girl, Laufersky posts blunt romantic advice for teenage girls—a recent tweet said, “You shouldn't have to convince someone who supposedly ‘cares’ about you not to flirt with other people." Another said: “If you stay caught up on someone who doesn't treat you right, you're fucking up your own happiness.”It’s the kind of advice she would have wanted to hear when she was 15. "I kind of wanted to instill confidence in girls, like you don't need a guy," she said.She also posts affiliate links to ChaCha content, earning between $25 and $60 per day at a rate of about two cents per click, she said. It’s not a fortune, but considering her rent is only $300 per month, it’s enough to support her full time, she said.“I’m not a very high-maintenance girl,” said Laufersky, who previously worked marketing and restaurant jobs.Devoted teenage fans of Heartless Girl send Laufersky Kik messages asking for boy advice and take her to task when she deviates from her steely persona, she told me.Anonymous novelty accounts mixing romantic advice, pictures of cute pets or movie quotes with the occasional affiliate link can earn hundreds or thousands of dollars per month for their owners, many of them “digital natives” still too young to drink.
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Studying at a university with a robust journalism program, he had no trouble finding writers willing to contribute content for a byline and “some extra cash to get through college,” he said. And after some issues with the setup of Blurred Minds, he’s in the process of building out a second site, called Profascinate, with articles like “Best College Dining Services in America” and “9 Life Lessons the Anchorman Movies Taught Us.”Solidum declined to say how much he’s earned, though he told me it’s “a good amount” every month.“For someone around my reach, I'd estimate they could pull in probably a six figure salary a year if not more, If they monetize everything correctly," he said.College-related articles, like a gallery of America’s most beautiful college campuses, have proven most popular with his followers, said Solidum, who suspects teens have migrated to Twitter after their parents and grandparents joined Facebook.If you stay caught up on someone who doesn't treat you right, you're fucking up your own happiness.
— Heartless Girl (@Heart_LessGirl) April 25, 2014
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Erik Sebastion, a Toronto social media consultant who sometimes posts advice on online marketing forums like BlackHatWorld, said he frequently sees teens trying to make social media affiliate marketing their first job.“BlackHat is full of 16 year olds,” he said. “I’m only 22 myself, but before that, I was doing construction; I was doing real work.”For those who get lucky, though, the money easily beats a typical afterschool job.Esma Ilyas, a 17-year-old Long Island high school senior, told me she and a friend started the Twitter account @TanGurlz about a year and a half ago, after a trip to the beach."We were actually tanning,” she said. “That's why we made it TanGurlz."If you just look up the word ‘bitch,’ you’ll find hundreds of mini accounts with under 500 followers that are just trying to make it out there. It's kind of brutal out there for anonymous accounts, but luckily I got a head start.
Now, the account has about 216,000 followers and, after she started posting links a couple of months ago, pulls in between $4,000 and $7,000 per month through Trend Junky’s affiliate program, she said.But Ilyas acknowledges some of her fans first found her on Tumblr, where she rose to prominence among Justin Bieber fans by trying to pose for photos with the pop star whenever he came to New York."Me and my friends, like, stalked him," she said. "I met him a lot. A lot of his fans know me from him."And for site operators like Quisenberry, the goal is to move beyond simply drawing traffic to individual articles from affiliate links and get to the point where fans check the homepage for new content every day.“We’re trying to take this to the whole next level,” Quisenberry said. “We're trying to build this into something like TMZ."Trend Junky also hopes to add longer and more substantial content geared to an older audience, explained Romero. "If Trend-Junky is the PG version of what we're doing, we're also looking to get into more PG-13 and offer more highbrow, for lack of a better word, or informative content to a bit of an older crowd," he said. “We're also looking to expand to another website that would handle these needs as well: [essentially a] Trend Junky Plus, for older folk, where we can touch on more substantial content: i.e. current affairs, global news, the inner workings of government, just more informative content overall.”I'm so over school
— Tan ☀️ Gurlz (@TanGurlz) April 29, 2014