In recent times, Instagram has become one market place for most of the celebrities where they promote themselves and their products to get a wider audience reach. Stardom is now calculated by the number of followers and the race is quite evident. Many celebrities collaborate with different sponsors for brand endorsements and charge a whopping amount per Instagram post. But are these millions of followers real?
According to an analysis from the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP), Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra are among the top 10 celebrities who have maximum numbers of fake followers or "bots" on Instagram.
While Deepika has landed at the sixth place on the fake followers' list with almost 48 per cent of fake followers (bots), Priyanka stands at the tenth spot with 46 per cent of fake Instagram followers. Deepika currently has 37.9 million followers on Instagram while Priyanka has 43.6 million.
At the top is talk show host Ellen DeGeneres with 58 per cent of fake Instagram followers, followed by boy-band BTS coming with 48 per cent.
Kourtney Kardashian was third with 49 per cent, while Kim Kardashian and Khloe Kardashian both had 44 per cent fake followers on the Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform.
Katy Perry has 53 per cent of her 83.6 million Instagram followers fake.
Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus are also ranked high for bots.
"We took various 'most successful' and 'most followed' to build our list of celebrities across acting, sport, music, and TV personalities. We then filtered this by the number of followers to give ourselves a top 100 most followed list," ICMP said in a statement.
"We then ran their Instagram and Twitter handles through IG Audit and Sparktoro's fake Twitter follower's tool to measure what percentage of their following was actually real," it added.
As Facebook-owned photo-messaging app Instagram continues to grow, influencer marketing has emerged as a major trend in 2019 that earned influencers the highest amount of money for paid posts to date.
Attaining the 19th spot, Priyanka made it to the list along with Indian cricketer Virat Kohli who sits on the 23rd rank. While Priyanka Chopra Jonas charges $271,000 per post, Kohli charges $196,000.
(With IANS Inputs)
