Is Talking About Your Favorite Brands Your New Side Hustle?

InfoFi turns enthusiasm into income. But when everyone posts for a payout, does it deepen fandom, or dilute it?

InfoFi is paying people thousands of dollars to tweet.

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Think about a company or product you genuinely love.

Maybe it’s Disney. You’ve memorized the ride schedule, know the best snack spots in every park, and plan your vacations around new attractions. Or you’re that Apple person who preorders the new iPhone the second it drops. Or maybe it’s Trader Joe’s; you’re the one who texts friends when the seasonal snacks hit.

You talk about it. You post on social media about it. You convince friends to try it. But what do you get in return?

You might get a few likes on Instagram. Maybe some views on YouTube. If you’re lucky, a friend will thank you for saving them money or showing them something they didn’t know existed.

Imagine it was much more than that. Imagine a world where you get tangible rewards, financial or otherwise, just by sharing your enthusiasm. That’s the world InfoFi, a new system that is taking attention on X (formerly Twitter) and turning it into cash in people’s pockets, hopes to create.

On paper, this sounds like a great idea. You’ve been giving free marketing to your favorite companies without any sort of compensation. Why shouldn’t you get a piece of the pie?

From Posts to Paydays: How InfoFi Took Off

Kaito, the most aggressive player in the InfoFi space, burst onto the scene in full force in 2025, when it rewarded the loudest voices with the biggest followings in the crypto space on X. For its launch, people who kept the conversation going on Crypto Twitter received rewards in Kaito’s native cryptocurrency token. That cryptocurrency could then be sold for real dollars - with some people on the top end exchanging it for over $100,000.

But the hype didn’t stop there. Soon crypto products, protocols, and communities were reportedly paying six figures to the platform to manage leaderboards for their products, with the promise of delivering similar token allocations (known as airdrops) to the people who ranked highest. On the backend, those companies would receive data about their biggest fans, who connect a litany of accounts including their crypto wallets, X handles, and emails to the platform. Now, instead of Kaito offering its own native cryptocurrency as a reward, it could serve as the intermediary to distribute tokens and rewards for clients.

The early results showed some people with large followings earning as much as $10,000/month from Kaito clients just for posting about various projects on X. In one two-day sprint campaign for a token (appropriately called $LOUD), 1,000 people made ~$2,000 each just for posting. And, the companies issuing the payments were able to pay for attention they received, rather than paying an influencer up-front and hoping for results.

It sounds like a win-win. Until it’s not. When everyone starts posting to earn, whether they care about the product they’re talking about or not, does anything feel genuine anymore? That’s the question at the heart of InfoFi.

Is rewarding enthusiasm a way to elevate fandom, or just a new way to flood the feed with noise?

What Makes InfoFi Different

Before diving into InfoFi’s pitfalls and opportunities, it’s worth noting that social listening isn’t new. For over a decade, brands have used tools to monitor online chatter. In industries where customer service is critical, such as airlines and insurance, social listening is integrated as part of CRM systems to track sentiment, handle complaints, and safeguard brand reputation in real time.

Social rewards aren’t new either. Most often, they’ve taken the form of random giveaways or occasional contests where the best post wins.

What’s different about InfoFi is that it turns talking about your favorite brands into a competitive sport. Instead of a one-off moment or lucky break, you climb public leaderboards - with rewards tied directly to your ranking. If you like a brand, and you know that mechanic is in place, you’re likely going to be a little louder about it.

The data that the company gets, and how it’s used, is a stark change as well. I’ve worked at large companies, and they always know their celebrity fans, but rarely know the everyday people who love their brands. This gives them a clear list of fans, in rank order, based on whatever parameters the company uses to define its leaderboard.

More importantly, it gives brands a way to reward those fans directly. That creates an opportunity to forge closer connections with everyday people who genuinely love the brand, but it also raises questions about authenticity, incentives, and long-term sustainability.

The Early Challenges of InfoFi

The early promise of InfoFi is compelling, but it comes with tradeoffs. When rewards are on the line, some users will promote anything, whether they believe in it or not. That flood of incentivized content can blur the line between fandom and advertising, and in the worst cases, dilute both. The early challenges come in four forms:

• Authenticity gets murky: When posting earns rewards, it's harder to tell who’s genuinely a fan and who’s just chasing a payout. Early Kaito campaigns saw people posting about products they didn’t understand, just to climb the leaderboard and secure more money.

• Signal dilution: A flood of incentivized posts can bury real and honest conversation. Spam and lazy AI-generated content is often rewarded, effectively amplifying noise over value.

• Loss of fun: What used to be joyful - posting about something you love - can start to feel like work. Passion becomes performance. People start watching leaderboards, feeling like they HAVE to send a post a day about a topic, or risk losing money.

• The rich get richer: Leaderboards often favor big accounts with built-in reach, leaving smaller (and often more passionate) voices behind. The gap widens when those same large accounts post “how to earn with InfoFi” guides, ignoring that a large part of their success came from their audience size.

Evolving InfoFi to Sustainably Work at Scale

So with all those challenges, can InfoFi actually grow, and do it sustainably? It’s a fair question, especially when you consider its close ties to crypto, an industry already burdened by its own reputation for over-financialization (something I explored in a previous piece). But despite the noise, there’s real potential here if the right systems, incentives, and values are put in place.

Here’s how InfoFi could evolve to reward real fandom without losing the plot:

Better Data, Better Outcomes

The most obvious necessary evolution in InfoFi is the quality of data being used. After all, a leaderboard is only as smart as the inputs it’s built on. Today, most InfoFi campaigns rely almost entirely on engagement metrics - likes, replies, and impressions - which can be gamed and don’t always reflect genuine fandom.

But that can evolve. With better inputs, brands can build more meaningful ranking systems.

Imagine you’re the New York Yankees trying to come up with a fandom leaderboard. It’s no easy task - you’re one of the most popular sports teams on the planet. You’ll certainly need more data than just rewarding fans for posts on social media.

You could, in addition to social media data, pull in information like ticket purchases, official merchandise orders, or attendance at fan fest events. If someone posts weekly to a large following, but hasn’t been to a game in five years, should they really outrank someone with season tickets who attends nearly every game?

And, even on social media, the option to layer in things like videos, podcasts, and live streams provide a better depth of fandom. Adding these layers also helps solve the problem of people spamming low-effort content just to climb the leaderboard.

When multiple data points feed into the system, it becomes harder to game and easier to surface true fans over opportunistic posters.

Of course, it’s a delicate balance. You don’t want to build a system where people can simply buy their way to the top. Getting it right will take trial and error, but it’s essential to capturing a fuller picture of what fandom actually looks like.

This will take time, because it requires one of two things - either duct taping together multiple existing systems, or moving tickets and fan identity onto the blockchain - something Scott Duke Kominers and I strongly advocate for in The Everything Token. I won’t go into detail about how that works, but you can read all about it in our book.

Either way, once the data improves, the leaderboard logic, and how it weights social media chatter, will need an upgrade as well.

Smarter Leaderboards

As long as social media is a data point, and the key metrics remain likes, views, or comments, it’s inevitable that the largest accounts will continue to dominate.

If a large brand were to adopt this system, there are a couple of ways to level that part of the playing field:

1. Tiered leaderboards by follower count: Users would be grouped based on the size of their connected social accounts, competing only against others with similar reach. This creates fairer comparisons and broader participation. That said, it raises the question of rewards: do lower tiers receive smaller payouts, or does each tier earn equally for its top performers?

2. Weighted leaderboards based on ratios: This approach would normalize engagement relative to audience size. For a very simple example, one reply on an account with 100 followers would be weighted the same as 100 replies on an account with 10,000. Of course, this would require fine-tuning, since reply rates don’t scale linearly. Getting one reply at 100 followers is common; 100 at 10,000 is much harder. Still, a well-calibrated weighted system would be more meritocratic, giving smaller but dedicated accounts a real chance to shine, and potentially gain followers in the process.

However, smarter leaderboards can’t just be more fair, they also need to be more sustainable. Always-on competition chasing a monthly paycheck burns people out. The next evolution is building models that reward creativity, authentic participation, and real enthusiasm over time.

Fine Tuning the Model

Part of the problem with InfoFi today lies in its campaign structure. Most efforts are broad and open-ended, rewarding the top spots on a monthly leaderboard with cash. There isn’t much creative direction or narrative. That can lead to low-effort posts, copy-paste spam, and a focus on farming engagement instead of expressing real enthusiasm.

Here are two alternative models that could create a more sustainable and engaging system:

1. Evergreen Leaderboards - These run continuously but reward consistency and long-term contribution rather than short bursts of attention. They could spotlight brand advocates who show up over time, not just those who spike in a given week. People who regularly create thoughtful content, respond to others, or tell personal stories rise gradually. Rewards can be sporadic surprise-and-delights. The money-chasers won’t try to rank on them, because there’s no imminent prize. Even if a big reward is announced to be coming in one month, the brand could use the previous six months or year of data to find its top fans, not just the one-month sprint. Or, for a one-month sprint, they could take a different method…

2. Seasonal or Product-Based Leaderboards - Rather than ranking everyone on the same vague criteria, brands could run focused campaigns tied to product launches, events, or cultural moments - think "Fall Drinks" for Starbucks, "Holiday Travel" for Delta, or "Back to School” for Target. These campaigns add structure, invite creativity, and give people a more clear prompt to respond to. They also create natural windows to reset the competition and highlight new voices.

And within both options, for large international brands, regional leaderboards might make sense. This can let them hyperfocus on specific products which may not be worldwide, and hone in on specific cultural norms as they relate to fandom. Kaito is already experimenting with regional leaderboards.

Done right, these models don’t just reduce spam, they refocus the system around storytelling, consistency, and real connection. Which, ironically, is sort of the whole point of social media in the first place.

Changing the Rewards

Another critical change to make InfoFi scalable is rethinking the types of rewards being offered. It sounds obvious, but not every brand should be handing out free money just to get people talking. The kind of reward a brand offers directly influences who shows up - and why. In other words, your reward structure becomes your filter.

I won’t list every possible reward model here. The options are vast and will ultimately need to be brand-specific. I may explore hypothetical implementations in future pieces, but broadly speaking, rewards should align with the identity, audience, and values of the company.

If you're giving away cryptocurrency, you'll likely attract crypto traders. If you're offering rare shoes, you'll attract sneakerheads. If you're raffling off a trip to the college football national championship game, you'll naturally pull in college football fans, not just engagement farmers. The incentive shapes the culture around the campaign.

And it doesn’t always have to be cash or prizes. Sometimes, the most meaningful rewards are experiential or access-based. A band might send personalized video messages to top fans. A trading card game might offer early access to unreleased drops. A luxury fashion brand might invite leaderboard winners to an invite-only runway show or design studio tour.

These kinds of rewards don’t just attract the right participants, they reinforce loyalty, deepen brand connection, and keep the experience feeling personal rather than purely transactional.

Bringing it Back to Fandom

At its core, InfoFi is a bet that fandom is worth something. It’s a bet that the attention people freely give away today could become an asset tomorrow. And, on the flip side, a bet that implementing InfoFi can help a company identify top fans, leading to more meaningful connections, higher sales, and new social media content - from both the fans and the brand.

That idea has power. But how it’s implemented will make or break whether it becomes a meaningful shift or just another hype cycle.

It’s easy to build leaderboards that reward volume. It’s harder to build ones that reward love - the kind of genuine, long-term loyalty that keeps people coming back, even when they’re not being paid.

If InfoFi evolves in the right direction, with better data, smarter incentives, and brand-aligned rewards, it could become more than a play for impressions. It could become a tool for amplifying the value of real community in a digital age for all parties involved.

So to answer the question that started it all:

Can talking about your favorite brands really be your new side hustle?

Maybe. It depends on whether the future of InfoFi is built for clicks…or for authentic, passionate fandom.