Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2014; the monthly revenue, number of Facebook pages, fan counts, reach, annual profit and staff figures it cites are from that time, and the pages described may no longer be active.
This isn’t the first story we’ve published about how someone who uses social media with a clear strategy manages to earn large sums of money in a short time. At 21, a petrol station attendant built a million-dollar business selling through Facebook, while another entrepreneur made 3 million in 10 months thanks to Instagram.
This time it’s Jason Fyk, a family man who went bust along with the property market in 2005 and decided to look for a way to make money fast, because he needed it to feed his wife and son.
According to the Business Insider article, Fyk now owns a business that brings in around $275,000 a month. His greatest ally is Facebook, where he has managed to harness the social network’s traffic to boost several Facebook pages and send that traffic on to his websites, which currently get millions of visits and generate high advertising income.
One of his Facebook pages is WTF Magazine, and one of his websites is FunnierPics.net. Altogether, Fyk is estimated to have more than 28 million fans across all his Facebook pages, which are devoted to fun and entertainment.
But getting here hasn’t been easy for him, just as it isn’t easy now to fight off all the bad things that crop up on Facebook itself because of his popularity: Fyk is often the target of hacker attacks.
But where did Jason Fyk’s idea come from?
He says that once he was bankrupt, some friends he was talking to explained how to build a website. He then reckoned that the best subject for quick success had to be entertainment, ideally done in an original way, since that’s the kind of thing that tends to go viral most easily.
Broke, and shaping his business with no experience of what he was doing, he decided to go on a trip to film a group of young people doing stunts, so he would have original content to upload to his site. But, unluckily for Fyk, a fight broke out among some drunks right there. Fyk filmed the fight too, until things turned serious; then he stopped filming and stepped in to separate the drunken street fighters.
At least that’s Fyk’s version, because according to the police he was to blame for the brawl, having allegedly organised it to get material for his website, and he was even charged with attempted murder. That was enough to land Fyk in jail.
Two months later the charges were dropped and Fyk was released from prison. His situation had got worse, and his debts were now too big to be paid off by working behind the counter at McDonald’s, so he carried on with the plan he had set himself.
He admits that his wife thought he was crazy. “We didn’t even have enough to eat, and there I was creating a load of Facebook pages on every subject imaginable.”
Today, Fyk has around 40 Facebook pages, controls more than 28 million likes and reaches more than 260 million people, generating significant traffic to his various sites and bringing him several million a year in profit. His company now has 16 people on the payroll and has branched out into other businesses such as social media consulting.
See also: Entrepreneurs: what nobody tells you but you need to know
This article is adapted from a piece originally published by Business Insider.
Further reading
- How to find the perfect product to sell
- She believed so firmly in her idea that she risked everything
Featured image: unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
