There are plenty of ways of making money on Facebook that range from selling products on the platform itself to driving traffic to a site where customers can buy the products there. Sometimes, shuffling the traffic around is enough to make money in itself. But Facebook keeps developing and they’ve come up with a new way to earn an income online. All it takes is being utterly outrageous.
The thing is that this new way of making money on Facebook is an invitation-only program that literally pays members just for interactions. Getting the Likes and the Shares used to be a hobby for Facebookers that put a huge smile on their faces. But they don’t have to do it for free anymore. They can get paid for their Likes and the entire Comments section as well.
To make it legitimate, Facebook calls it the Performance bonus program and even refers to its members as “creators.” To be fair, some of them actually are. But with everything that is good, there is an element that comes in and takes advantage of a good thing.
It’s all over Facebook and it gets easy to detect when you start to see it. At first, you think the poster made a simple mistake like spelling a name wrong or getting the facts twisted. But no, they are doing it on purpose and it’s only to spark those interactions.
Imagine a post that talks about Katie Ledecky and highlights her career as an American swimmer who is doing phenomenally in the 2024 Paris Olympics. The thing is that the post is accompanied by the Danish swimmer Victoria Bierre, a student at the University of Copenhagen. Of course, there will be thousands of Likes and hundreds of Comments about how beautiful she is and how awesome she is as an athlete.
There might even be thousands of Shares because people aren’t paying attention to the post with the picture accompanying it. Then, there are people who will notice and they’ll comment that the picture is wrong. There might be thousands of comments about who is actually in the picture and how it’s not Katie Ledecky.
Of course, because everyone is on the internet, there will be some awesome name-calling like “moron” and “idiot.” Some people even have the special ability to throw around even more juicy words than those. But do you think the poster cares?
No. Because they’re laughing all the way to the bank after making money. Every interaction they get on that post is just more coin in their pocket. They might even comment back and say, “Thank you” with a nice smiley face to let you know they appreciate your participation in making them rich.
What really works is being obnoxious. Misspelling Michael Jordan’s name will stir the pot. Jumping into a social issue with an absolutely moronic take will set a post on fire. Make anything up and make sure it touches on the triggers that ignite people the most. That’s the formula for making money.
Recently, there was an absurd post about Oliver Anthony and a song he wrote called, “I Don’t Care About Your Pronouns.” With over 11,000 Likes, Hates, Loves, and Wows with about 1,000 comments as well as over 1,000 Shares, that poster was sitting pretty well on a nice Facebook payout. Of course, a subject like that is going to cause a ruckus.
The fact is that the song doesn’t even exist. It’s just an absurdly ridiculous post that throws Oliver Anthony under the bus, a musician on the rise. What a good way to create some haters for him! The problem is that some Facebookers are so triggered, that they’ll dive right into the comment section with their opinions before they even take a moment to look it up first.
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In this incident, the information looks innocent enough. But as a fan of The Big Bang Theory, an alarm should start going off when looking at Mayim Bialik and Jim Parsons. The post says they’re dressed up like Kaley Cuoco and Johnny Galecki’s characters. Something doesn’t add up right. They’re actually dressed up like the characters played by Melissa Rauch and Simon Helberg.
That’s no major issue. It won’t cause a war or anything. But it’s enough to get fans of The Big Bang Theory to comment all about it and thousands of them will keep making the same correction over and over. Each reaction is another coin in the cash register.
That’s how easy it is. The most absurd thing about all this is the Fact-Checking system Facebook has in place. If a poster states an opinion, Fact-Checkers are there to inform readers of the potential hazard of being exposed to it. If a Facebooker posts a joke, the Fact-Checkers come running to dispute the premise and contest the punchline. But these “Performance bonus program” posts don’t come with a warning label. They are free to spawn misinformation at will.
So, being an invitation-only program means that Facebook hand-picks these members to create a stir on the platform. What they found is that the easiest and most effective way to do it is by being absolutely ridiculous. It’s a cool gig if you can get it.
