TIME magazine has unveiled its second annual roundup of the most influential people on the Internet. The company came up with this unranked list by looking at their global impact on social media and their overall ability to drive news.
The list includes famous people like Kanye West, his wife Kim Kardashian, DJ Khaled and Nigerian American Angie Nwandu.
Here are some of the people that made the list:
Kanye West.
Kanye recently went on a Twitter rant which made people think maybe he was going south. Was he really or was it just a stunt? Who knows? But the the 39-year-old rapper makes news with less than 140 characters. 20.2 million people follow him on Twitter and he only follows one person, his wife. Kanye used the Internet to shake up the idea of an album as we know it, treating his latest LP, The Life of Pablo, like a work in progress by refusing to sell it (it’s only available on the streaming service Tidal) and promising alterations to its “final” version.
Kim Kardashian West
She nearly broke the Internet with a racy cover of “Paper” magazine in 2014 and recently tweeted naked selfies which she said was to show she was not ashamed of her body.
Kim Kardashian West really knows how to work the Internet. She knows she has the power to influence her 63.9m followers on Instagram, 27.9m fans on Facebook and 41.8million on Twitter; not even counting millions more who followed her when she joined Snapchat last week.
She also launched two new mobile apps in the past year, including Kimoji, which nearly broke Apple’s app store as more than 9,000 people per second were downloading the app.
Angie Nwandu
Nigerian Angie Nwandu has made it her business to capture and report celebrity drama. Two years ago, she started a platform The Shade Room, an instagram account and a blog for celebrities on social media. The instagram account currently has 3.9million followers. According to her in a recent interview. “The Shade Room is really the “truth” room where myself and the readers can express our honest opinions on certain topics. However, after we became more and more popular, the readers that we affectionately labeled ‘roommates’, demanded more than just gossip. They wanted a little bit of community news, trending news, etc. They wanted more positivity and substance as well, and we found that it was important to provide more than just gossip, even though that is our primary focus!”
Nwandu started The Shade Room right after she’d quit a dead-end job as an accountant for a motorcycle company that, she told me, had stopped paying her. Now she has a full-time staff of four who work in shifts to publish 24 hours a day; 20 unpaid interns around the country who work around 10 hours a week, going to events and keeping an ear to the ground in Atlanta, Miami, New York, and L.A.; and an ever-growing number of readers, aka “Roommates,” who submit tips of varying levels of accuracy
The Shade Room quickly gained readers thanks to its quick-hit, bottom-up approach to black celebrity gossip.
Click here to see the full list of 30 Most Influential People on the Internet
Sources: TIME, Buzzfeed
