He now makes upward of $4,000 a month, he said, through a mix of social media platforms.
“I was making less money at the movie theater than sitting in my room live-streaming five times a day,” he said. Hill got a job at a concession stand at a Chelsea movie theater but quit after a few weeks, never bothering to pick up his last paychecks. “At first that was like $300 to live in a basement, but then they wanted me to have a better life.” “We basically came to an agreement where it was like, if you want me to be sitting in my room and going live every day, you need to pay my rent,” Mr. Garner had their first month’s rent covered, but neither had regular income, so they began asking their followers for help. He moved into a basement apartment in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn with Jake Garner, another live-streaming influencer, who he met through Tumblr. With $22 in his pocket and a plane ticket his mother bought him, he came to New York City to start over. Hill’s Tumblr following grew while he was studying at Texas State University, but he did not lean on them financially until this year, when he had a “manic episode” in January over a bad breakup and dropped out of college a few credits shy of graduating. “That was the first time I realized my followers care about my well-being,” he said. He asked his followers for help, thinking he might raise a few hundred dollars at best.
“I was panicking because my grandma is my life,” he said. The generosity of his followers first came to light in 2016, when his grandmother’s power was turned off because of unpaid bills. He retreated to online message boards and interactive role-playing games like MapleStory, where he would troll other players (often with nasty comments like “fatherless”).īut as he got older, he shed his online anonymity and joined Tumblr, where he documented his life as a gay high schooler raised in a religious household.
Hill grew up in Missouri City, Tex., with 11 siblings and was raised by a single mother who was a Jehovah’s Witness. A community based around me.” ‘Why Go to Work?’ “When I talk to friends who have known me for a long time, they could never understand sending a random person money, and I kind of feel the same way,” he said. Hill to cover his $1,300 monthly rent and living expenses, which include marijuana, help for his mother, video games and a $100 monthly budget for thrift store T-shirts.