16 million accounts of Instagram influencers fake: Study

New Delhi : A whopping 16 million accounts of Indian influencers on Facebook-owned Instagram are fake, revealed a new study, suggesting such people are artificially boosting "vanity metrics" that marketers often use while selecting influencers, including followers and engagement.

The research by Swedish e-commerce start-up A Good Company and data analytics firm HypeAuditor jointly assessed 1.84 million Instagram accounts across 82 countries.

It found the three regions with the most fakes on the Facebook-owned platform are the US (49 million), Brazil (27 million) and India (16 million).

"The Instagram fraud is estimated to cost marketers close to $750 million globally in wastage in a market now worth about $1.7 billion.

Marketing firm Mediakix estimated that influencer marketing on Instagram alone could reach $2 billion by the end of this year from $1 billion in 2017.

"Companies are pouring money into influencer marketing, thinking that they are connecting with real people and not Russian bots. In reality, they are pouring money down the drain and giving away free products to someone who acquired a mass-following overnight," Anders Ankarlid, CEO of A Good Company, told PRWeek.

The rise in popularity of social media platforms has opened up a relatively new advertising economy driven by "influencer marketing".

While Instagram has over a billion monthly active users globally, its parent company Facebook has over 2.38 billion monthly active users and over 16 million people log in to Twitter every day. WhatsApp is another powerful platform which has over 300 million users in India.