The follower factory: what a fake audience actually costs
Followers cost about a cent each. Clicks cost less. Here is the documented price list, the two regulators who called it illegal, and the honest limits of the data.
Archive
Month: July 2026
Who pays for the candid photo
A publicist says he paid a star $50,000 for a couple of street shots. A declared sponsored post from the same tier costs over $1M. That gap explains the whole staged-candid economy.
One in three: what Meta’s own researchers wrote down
A 2019 internal slide said “we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.” Meta says the Journal mischaracterised small self-report studies. Both things can be read from the same documents — and now a jury has weighed in.
Trellis Audience Group PLC: annual report and accounts
A fictional engagement-services company reports a solid year. The letter to shareholders is confident, the segments are growing, and the risk factors are load-bearing. Satire.
$1.26 million for one Instagram post: the SEC crypto ledger
A running tally of the celebrities the SEC has charged over undisclosed crypto promotion, what each one paid, and the FTX defendants who mostly won.
The disclosure rules everyone is breaking
$53,088 per violation, a 5-0 vote, more than 700 companies already on notice - and, so far, not a single penalty judgment under the FTC's flagship fake-reviews rule.
The study where nobody could tell
144 Dutch girls could not distinguish reshaped Instagram photos from real ones — and rated the fakes higher. What that experiment supports, what the contested wider literature does not, and why design beats headlines.