YOUTH CULTURE & NEWS

YCU: Twittering for Dollars

By Paul Asay | January 2010

Earning $10,000 every tweet; kids spend 8 hours a day with media; top video games; more.

Twitter Bling -- Rapper/producer Soulja Boy hasn't had a monster hit for a while, but don't worry about how he's making ends meet: The musical artist still makes plenty tweeting. Soulja Boy earns upward of $10,000 for every tweet -- assuming the tweets are related to the products he endorses, of course. That equals more than $73 per character (including spaces), if he uses up his full 140-character allotment. He's not the only one to earn big bucks on Twitter to push products. Dr. Drew Pinsky, central figure in VH1's show "Celebrity Rehab," also earns $10,000 or more for each promotional tweet, while Greg Grunberg (of NBC's "Heroes"), Lauren Conrad (MTV's "The Hills") and Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian make between $5,000 and 10,000. While Twilight's Robert Pattinson isn't on the list of highest Twitter advertisers, a Twitter celebrity known as "Fake Robert Pattinson" makes between $1,000 and $5,000. (ABC News)

Youth Can't Get Enough Tech -- It's kind of amazing that kids and teens can still get into so much trouble. I mean, when do they find the time? A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation discovered that children ages 8 to 18 spend more than 53 hours a week connected with some form of media -- or nearly eight hours a day. And, if you take into account time spent multitasking, the numbers become even more remarkable. Those numbers go up even more, if you take into account the time these kids spend multitasking -- say, texting to a friend while watching television. If parsed out separately, the average child's weekly media time balloons to about 75 hours a week. The tube still rules the media roost. Youth watch nearly five hours of television or movies a day, according to Kaiser's study. Listening to music accounts for another 2.5 hours, while kids use the Internet or play video games for another three hours a day. They send 90 minutes worth of text messages, too. Reading? That accounts for just 38 minutes of a child's average day—just slightly more than they spend talking on the phone. (Kaiser Family Foundation)

Americans Settle For Second … in Texting -- Two South Korean teens -- 17-year-old Bae Yeong Ho and 18-year-old Ha Mok Min -- topped a pair of Americans in the first LG Mobile World Cup texting championship. The South Koreans won the $100,000 grand prize for texting 120 words in 2 minutes, 26 seconds. The Americans, 16-year-old Kate Moore and 14-year-old Morgan Dynda, took 2 minutes, 48 seconds to text the same120 words. (New York Post)

The Top Selling Video Games of All Time

1. Wii Play

2. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

3. Grand Theft auto: San Andreas

4. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

5. Wii Fit

6. Mario Kart

7. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

8. Madden NFL ‘07

9. Call of Duty: World at War

10: Namco Museum

Source: NPD