Pop singer Lady Gaga recently became the first person in history to amass 20 million Twitter followers.
It should come as little surprise that the Queen of Pop shot to the top: the top seven Twitter users with the most followers are all celebrities. President Barack Obama, with around 12.9 million followers, come in eighth place, just behind Kim Kardashian.
According to TwitterCounter, Lady Gaga gains an average of almost 40,000 followers per day. Unlike many of the most-followed celebs on Twitter, Lady Gaga actually follows a good number of people herself. The pop star has 150 followers for every account she follows, whereas Oprah Winfrey has over 200,000 followers for every person she follows.
For many people, our Twitter follower tally really only influences our egos. But for a celebrity, a big Twitter base can mean the opportunity for big money from sponsored tweets.
According to New York Magazine, celebrities are often approached by companies asking them to promote a product in exchange for thousands of dollars. The article reveals that Kim Kardashian gets paid $10,000 for every tweet in which she plugs subscription-based e-commerce company ShoeDazzle. Snoop Dogg, who has shilled for Toyota and has about 7,000 fewer followers than Kardashian, gets $8,000 per tweet.
Twitter allows these paid tweets as long as they are posted manually, writes CBS News, and paid tweets should end with a hashtag like #ad or #spon (short for sponsored) according to the Federal Trade Commission.
Check out Twitter's top 19 most popular users, according to Twitter tracking website Twitaholic, in the slideshow below. Spoiler: they're not all superstars.
