The era of technology will never cease to amaze me. Apart from ELearning, Marketing and many other internet enabled activities, there is a new activity in town; Ebegging. Yes, beggars are not left out in digitizing their begging process and trust me internet pays. I have never heard nor seen a rich beggar until I heard about Jovan Hill, a college drop-out who begs online. Trust me he makes lots of money.
Jovan has come out to reveal how he makes a whooping £3,000, an equivalent of KSH. 391,800 each month to fund his high class lifestyle. All this money comes from begging. Traditional Beggars” mtajua hamju” better take lessons on how to digitize your business.
Being unemployed college dropout, Jovan Hill films himself asking his social media followers to donate cash so he can pay his rent and bills, which includes buying video games, vintage t-shirts and cannabis.
The 25-year-old Jovan who lives in Brooklyn utilizes various social media platforms including Periscope, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter as avenues to ask for cash from his over 200,000 followers.
I always believe that there are extremely good netizens because surprisingly, they heed to his pleas and donate to his PayPal account. He got real royal fans who believe in charity. Some of his followers leave positive comments on his pleas.
Speaking to New York Times, Jovan said “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”. “But it’s a community. A community based around me.”
Jovan identified this golden opportunity back in 2016 when he went online asking for financial help to pay electricity bill for his grandmother citing that it had been turned off due to unpaid bill. His online community donated £3000 an equivalent of Sh. 391,800. Quite a fortune!
Jovan continued to praise his followers saying “That was the first time I realized my followers care about my well-being,”.
Jovan did not get into begging by choice. Circumstances forced him to. No wonder he conducts begging in different levels. Quite a differentiation strategy which is required to succeed in every industry.
He was raised up by a single mother together with 11 siblings in Texas, and later moved to New York to start over when he dropped out of college due to a bad break-up. With nothing in his pocket Jovan knew he needed a job to survive and he started working at cinema. He left his job when he began making money online. When asked by viewers of his video why he doesn’t get a convectional job he replies, “I made this my job.