Beauty bloggers who buy fake followers

Crown

Crown

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
YouTube star Chloe Morello claims fellow beauty bloggers are committing 'fraud' by buying fake followers and comments to fool brands for free products and trips.


  • Chloe has detailed her lengthy investigation in a 17-minute video on YouTube
  • Showed how these 'fake' profiles had more likes than views on their posted clips
  • Also found these profiles got exact same number of comments with every post
  • Chloe looked into follower growth as well, found that they spiked once a week
  • She said the influencers fool brands to think they're paying for real engagement


Here's a quote from the video:

"I'm seeing a lot of influencers come up and actually committing fraud, by fraudulently acquiring followers, comments, and likes on Instagram. This is going to sound so dramatic, but keep in mind, social media is a billion dollar business. We get paid to promote products, we get sent away on trips, we get gifted so much cool stuff. Brands are paying thousands of dollars for posts with these people, and some of these people have no following."


She also found evidence of her theory on SocialBlade, a social media analytics site that can track the growth of any Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter account.

Chloe compared her own projection of growth to that of two users who she suspected were buying fake followers, muzzing out their names.

"I've got a very smooth projection of growth, and there are some times when that projection increases quite rapidly and sometimes when it's really slow," she explained.

"You can see pretty clearly that these people are buying followers once a week. It will go up really fast and plateau really fast, these followers have been bought in chunks."

"It's natural that someone might have a very rapid projection - I get them when I do giveaways or someone gives me a shout out - but to have a succession of it 10 weeks in a row, I do not know how that's possible."

Source and full article (with more details and evidence) - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...-bloggers-committing-fraud.html#ixzz4yyGc4P00


I strongly advise you to watch her video about this and also read the above article. She makes some good points:


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I have zero knowledge about the "beauty" vloggers but I suppose her allegations wouldn't surprise me. If there's money to be made, people will always look for short-cuts. Thoughts?
 
I'm not a beauty vlogger but i can relate and shed some light on how the partnerships work -

We have done several videos that are 'sponsored' (requested by a developer or given a key) they will often look for how posotive we are, how active our fans are & if we would be a good idea to be given a game to review/do a video on.

So it would be beneficial for us or people like us to bot likes or 'buy' followers because it would get us more partnerships.

Does that make it right? No.

I think that buying followers is pretty silly, you'll never learn what your fans want or like. In addition i doubt you would enjoy creating content since all you want is free trips/products.

Hope my word vomit can be understood!
 
I guess they are taking advantage of the famous "snowball effect", paying for a jump start and then work with that advantage. A not so legal move, true, but I am not sure if I really blame them because it's an highly competitive environment.
 
Conso1727 said:
I guess they are taking advantage of the famous "snowball effect", paying for a jump start and then work with that advantage. A not so legal move, true, but I am not sure if I really blame them because it's an highly competitive environment.
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I would somewhat agree with you if they weren't using said boost to essentially scam companies, using bots to grow fine go nuts doesn't affect me. But using it to scam others is quite wrong.

Just my 2 cents your point made me think. :)
 
I actually reported someone from these very forums to youtube for the exact same reasons, it was clear the person was buying subs/views/engagement, i reported it all to youtube and of course nothing happened :) people have been doing this sort of thing since it was possible to make money on youtube and i don't see it stopping anytime soon
 
While I don't doubt that this goes on, I have a hard time believing that big brands would sponsor a channel that has clearly botted his/her YT channel or instagram page. To anyone that understands social media, it is very easy to detect.
 
Crown said:
While I don't doubt that this goes on, I have a hard time believing that big brands would sponsor a channel that has clearly botted his/her YT channel or instagram page. To anyone that understands social media, it is very easy to detect.
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A lot of brands DON'T understand media though thats the thing.

A lot will look at numbers and go 'Hey 500k subs i want you to review my thing!"
 
thats the thing though, as @DigiBox said a lot of brands don't understand it or just don't care, a while back i owned a dog website and got approached by a marketing company to advertise on my site, not once did they even ask what sort of traffic the website let alone engagement etc lol
 
Her video is pretty awesome! I'm glad that she was straight-up on what she does and what is going on with other 'influencers'.
 
Update to this - I said earlier that companies never really look at what you make just numbers.

we just received an email from (ironically) a beauty company asking us to unbox some of their makeup on camera.

We are a gaming channel.

we never do IRL things ever.

They literally opened the email with 'we see you have 1084 subscribers!' I feel sorry for companies like this who get scammed by people who buy followers. :\
 
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