Favikon

My favorite pastime is opening Favikon to see which content formats have been beaten to death this month across social media. This month's champion: the laptop-by-the-pool shot. All of them on one screen and not a single line of work has been done in any.

Remember the LinkedIn bot purge of 2023? The Instagram 2026 cleanup is making it look small. In 30 days, the top 20 accounts lost 100M+ followers: ❌ Ronaldo: -8.95M ❌ Selena Gomez: -8.15M ❌ Ariana Grande: -7.91M ❌ Kim Kardashian: -7.55M ❌ Nike: -5.38M By comparison, the biggest purge we've seen at the time on LinkedIn was -500K (someone went from 550K followers to 50K followers, true story). At Favikon we track tons of creator profiles. Watching this in real time, a few things the industry has been too polite to say: 1/ Fake follower fraud is not a fringe problem. It's a structural tax on every brand campaign that uses follower count as a buying signal. $1B+ wasted every year. Money that never reached a real human. 2/ The biggest accounts attract the most fraud. Not because the creators are doing anything wrong: obviously Ronaldo hasn't bought fake followers. But because bots optimize for credibility. A 500M-follower account is the perfect hiding place for 10M fake ones. Visibility is camouflage. 3/ Follower count has been broken for years. Brands that already moved to engagement-weighted, audience-quality-weighted ROI didn't lose anything yesterday. Brands still buying on follower count just had a very expensive morning. 4/ Mid-tier creators just got repriced upward. When the top of the funnel gets a haircut, the middle gets more valuable. Quietly. This is the most honest the leaderboards have been in a decade. The creator economy is finally pricing reality. Credit to Instagram for moving fast. Painful day for vanity metrics. Good day for everyone building on real signal (and the Favikon score). What's your benchmark for audience quality now that follower count is officially dead?