Mega-influencers lose millions of followers in a short time: HypeAuditor
AI analytics platform HypeAuditor, an analytics platform for brands seeking fair, transparent, and effective influencer marketing, has recently found some of the world’s top celebrity influencers have been collectively losing millions of their Instagram followers in the last 14 days alone.
HypeAuditor’s analysis showed that rather than the decline representing a mass exodus of fans, it appeared to be a targeted approach by Instagram itself going through a purge of bots and fake followers.
According to the platform, between September 6 and 13, 2022, 13.5% of all Instagram accounts saw a decline in followers.
Accounts with 100,000 to one million followers (31.5%) and accounts with more than one million followers (30.7%) were particularly affected. For the smaller accounts with 1,000 to 5,000 followers, only 8% recorded such a decline.
Cristiano Ronaldo, the largest influencer on Instagram with 476 million followers (as of September 15, 2022), has lost 1.6 million followers in just two weeks – though the number of fans is generally growing steadily.
International celebrities Kim and Khloe Kardashian recorded losses of 2.4 million followers in the same period. An analysis by HypeAuditor reveals that its primarily large Instagram accounts losing masses of followers.
Alex Frolov, CEO and co-founder of the AI-based analysis company said: “The loss of followers should not be a cause for concern for influencers or the brands they work with – quite the opposite. The massive loss of followers that stars like Cristiano Ronaldo or Kim Kardashian are currently experiencing does not mean that millions of fans are giving up their loyalty.
“Instead, we suspect the origin lies with Instagram itself. Such a purge of inactive or fraudulent accounts is nothing new. Other platforms such as Twitter or YouTube also run these from time to time to reduce the amount of inauthentic activity. We estimate that only about 60% of all Instagram accounts are real people. The rest are bots, inactive accounts or mass followers – and it’s highly unlikely that they are genuinely interested in shared content. So it only makes sense that Instagram should also remove mass accounts like these.”
Below is a list of influencers on Instagram who have lost several million followers in a few days:
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