Undefeated pound-for-pound king Floyd "Money" Mayweather has cracked the top 10 of Forbes 2014 Celebrity 100. The list reportedly measures a mix of money, fame and impact to rank the most powerful celebrities in the world. Mayweather was ranked 7th on the list thanks in large part to the fact that other than Tiger Woods, he's the only athlete to earn more than $100 million according to Forbes' list of highest-paid athletes.
Singer and actress Beyonce Knowles topped the list after having one of the biggest years of her career, which included $115 million in earnings. Coincidentally, Mayweather's influential adviser, Al Haymon, once reportedly had ties to Beyonce, but that's another story. Sandwiched between Beyonce and Mayweather are (in order): LeBron James (#2), Dr. Dre (#3), Oprah Winfry (#4), Ellen DeGeneres (#5), and Jay-Z (#6).
For an explanation on how the Celebrity 100 list is created, Forbes staff member Dorothy Pomerantz offered the following:
To create the Celebrity 100, we start by compiling earnings estimates for more than 200 celebrities to create a pool of top earners. To come up with our earnings estimates, we talk to agents, lawyers, producers and other in-the-know folks about entertainment-related earnings for each celebrity. That can include things like upfront pay for movies, syndication payments for old TV shows, tournament winnings and endorsements. We don't deduct for taxes, agent fees or the other costs of being a celebrity.
Then we use Factiva to count how many times each celebrity was mentioned in print, on TV and on the radio between June 1, 2013, and June 1, 2014, the time frame for this year's list.
We also measure social media reach with help from the smart people at StarCount. The Singapore-based company measures social networking power across 11 platforms including Twitter TWTR -0.24%, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut and Weibo. Each star's number is a reflection of how popular he or she is on the Internet.
This year, we also added an impact ranking (similar to the ones used in our lists of The World's Most Powerful Women and World's Most Powerful People) for each celebrity. The number is the degree of impact each celebrity has had on the entertainment industry and our culture overall during the prior year, based on the evaluation of the list editors, reporters and their sources for the list.
All of the data is processed through an algorithm that creates our power ranking. Earnings carry the most weight. We divide the celebrities into categories like musicians, actors, actresses and personalities, placing a certain number of celebrities from each category on the final list.
