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by txcwpalpha 2920 days ago
I wouldn't be surprised to see Instagram go the way of Twitter once more attention starts being called to the number of bots on IG. One of the big "value propositions" for IG is the advertising potential through influencers, but go to any influencer profile and you'll see that a significant portion of their followers are just paid bots. The "1 billion active accounts" number smells fishy to me.

I have a few friends that participate in the "influencer scene" (as influencers themselves and as marketing reps at companies who purchase posts from influencers) and it's basically an open secret at this point that aside from a select few celebs, any given influencer has an entire army of bots behind them to promote their posts. Getting on the top of the discover queue is basically just down to who has the bigger bot network.
3 comments
Infinitesimus 2920 days ago
It's going to become an ecosystem of bots following bots :) http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180402-the-fascinating-wo...
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seanalltogether 2920 days ago
If it's an open secret then the advertisers will adjust for it. Radio and tv stations have been working with fuzzy audience numbers for years and advertisers go along with it.
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txcwpalpha 2920 days ago
I'm pretty sure most advertisers already do adjust for it, because they know how big of a problem it is. But that's not what I meant to focus on.

What I'm trying to say is that, like Twitter, IG will probably start to lose a lot of public respect and valuation if they keep boasting "we have 1 billion active users!" once the general public starts to get wind of the fact that the 1 billion number is bullshit.

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mkirklions 2920 days ago
I totally agree.

I saw a hot girl with 1M followers. So I decided to check out her website.

Website looked like a bland woocommerce store, no soul, just the girl selling pictures of her and underwear.

I went to alexa's Site Info and saw her website was ranked top 5 million or something poor. However, her rank in india was top 100k. The girl was not Indian, she had botted/paid so much that her fake traffic was visiting her website more than her real traffic.

I guess I'm thinking I should start botting? I already make an instagram 'like' bot on friday in 60 minutes.

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