I've thought about it. It's a risk/reward thing, though. I like doing this, and I'd hate to be exposed as a fraud because then my passion project comes crashing down and what do I have left?

I guess that's the downside to trying to make money from a hobby. Either it stays a hobby that you don't make money from, or it becomes a second job and stops being a hobby.

Or sell your own products or link to affilate products where you get a cut.

Ignore the emails.

Won’t this really hurt for anyone who looks beyond just follower count? The ratio of your followers with your engagement (likes, comments, shares) will be pretty bad.

For those that look at that, they’ll be more turned off than a smaller following count but good engagement ratio.

It can, but you can also find some that sell the accounts themselves, allowing you to falsify a network. Think taking accounts and re-purposing them from being a modern, pop-culture following network to one that is tech-oriented, or more obscure. If you're planning on inserting yourself in this method, you really need to be in control of it all yourself. Follow the major people in your industry, with added randomness to remove following some, while adding randomness to extend the network further.

Keeping the network healthy is one of the more interesting topics. Simulating a real network is the biggest thing. It's very easy to embed yourself, unless it is that closed of a network.

Thankfully, you're not the first person to think of this, so there are also many ways to buy fake engagement.

Do this and risk getting buried deep in Instagram trending and popular accounts. A quick rule of thumb is say you have 1M users but you are only getting likes in few hundreds per post than that means you bought most of your users from a click farm. Marketers have evolved as well.

Buying likes and comments instead of just followers is trivial stuff, and makes it far harder to distinguish bought fame from real fame[1]

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/people-are-turning-t...

Aren't fake followers easy to uncover? Pretty sure there are analysis tools that look at follower engagement, growth patterns, etc. to determine legitimacy. You risk blowing your reputation as soon as anyone does a modicum of due diligence. Seems better to just grow organically.

I don't see the sort of people following influencers to be so savvy.

The people PAYING influences are.

So I think the circle is you buy followers to look popular, and fake real people into following you. Then you delete the fake followers and then have real followers to sell.

Yup; but like anything, you gotta fake it till you make it. Fake followers aren’t considered so much of a black mark in the industry but a sign you haven’t quite made it big yet, but you’re hustling.

It is easy if you are a sophisticate internet user. All the other people will be impressed when you boast your amount of followers.

So it will be easy for journalists and naysayers. Pretty much the most powerful people against you...

It seems the trend is to dismiss these discoveries by saying it was somebody trying to push negative reputation on their brand or get back at them. How do you go about directly proving the individual bought clicks and not just inferring based on the patterns of their followers?

It's easy to deny. If it was a clear bad mark against an account to have fake followers, anyone could buy fake followers to discredit their competition.

It’s all about the engagement rate so buying followers doesn’t really help. Platforms will usually cutoff anyone with low engagement for their followers count.

Who’s getting rich? “they’re all getting rich,” huh?