Bianca Claßen is one of Germany’s most successful “influencers”, a title bestowed upon social media stars. Almost six million people follow her channel, “Bibis Beauty Palace”, on YouTube. Her channel features over 850 videos on cosmetics, lifestyle and fashion, generating 2.6 billion clicks. It’s a lucrative business for Claßen – back in 2017, Manager Magazin estimated she was earning 110,000 euros a month. The essence of influencer marketing is that people with a strong social media presence can earn money by testing, reviewing and promoting companies’ products. But if you don’t want to invest years of hard work into attracting new fans and keeping your old ones like Claßen, you can always give a fake helping hand in other ways… “There is a global network that specialises in the sale of likes, followers and clicks”, says Professor Patrick Vonderau, a media scientist at the University of Halle.

And it doesn’t cost much to boost your digital success: You can sometimes buy 1,000 Instagram followers for as little as ten euros. A simple Google search is all you need to find a list of German-language providers for more followers, likes and clicks. Their websites often have a sophisticated design similar to that of online marketing agencies. “They have office hours, a hotline, a legal notice – and sometimes even a company profile on LinkedIn”, explains Vonderau. He is working with Professor Johan Lindquist, a social anthropologist from the University of Stockholm, to investigate the industry of bought likes and followers – and their importance – as part of a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council. The scientists are first focusing on online stores to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms of the market. As part of their project, they have been interviewing the owners of so-called “like shops”. “The situation is often depicted in the press as a black economy where the actors do not want to show their faces. We thought that might be a slight exaggeration”, says Vonderau. “We wanted to take a more neutral approach to the topic”.

The shop owners do not produce the likes and followers themselves. They are resellers who either procure their “goods” from social exchange networks or major panels. A social exchange network is where real people work for pennies. “As the platforms have a daily limit for likes and followers, you can’t earn more than 60 euros a month – so it’s not a very lucrative business”, says Vonderau. By contrast, panels also offer bots, which are computer programmes that pretend to be real people and are programmed to act independently. For example, they can be used to follow other user profiles and react to their posts. Similar to social exchange networks, however, bots can be exposed by the algorithms used by Facebook and other social media platforms.

While Lindquist has recruited informants for the research project from Indonesia, Vonderau is focusing on the German market. From a purely statistical perspective, he says, it is a small market in Germany. An average of around 70 “like shops” are online at any given moment, of which only a handful remain active for a considerable period of time. However, it is difficult to determine the actual size of the market – unlike other industries, there is no internal picture of the market. “There is no industry magazine. The actors only hear what is said about them in the press and what people are gossiping about”, says the researcher.
One of the findings from around 30 interviews is that the owners of “like shops” are almost always young men aged 30 and under. “They don’t see their work as professional online fraud”, says the scientist, referring to the situation as a legal grey area. And at least those who have so far been interviewed by the MLU researchers have no interest in influencing political views by selling their services to political parties or politicians. “The actors see their work as a stepping stone to a recognised profession, such as in online marketing”, says the researcher.

The shop owners argue and justify their actions by referring to the concept of “creative destruction”. This term basically means that industries will perish and be replaced if they are not innovative. Creative destruction was even the guiding principle that led Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, explains Vonderau. The innovative part was the promise that every user could become famous. But that didn’t work. However, there is still a demand for digital success. “Like shops merely create the supply for the demand”, says Vonderau. “In my opinion, that shows that Facebook and the other social media platforms have become the heavy and sluggish industries they once wanted to break away from”.

Vonderau believes an important point has been forgotten in the media coverage to date: “People who sell likes are part of an economy that also includes major corporations. Google’s organic rankings determine which companies I see online. And the market couldn’t function without payment services like PayPal either”. Even though frequent security updates make life harder for “like shops” on social media platforms, Vonderau argues he does not get the impression that Instagram and other sites want to stop it completely. Followers, likes and clicks are ultimately what drive traffic (interaction with a social network). The media scientist believes we should also be discussing that complex entanglement of interests.