I am old enough to remember when Instagram was all about the feed. I even remember chronological order, which now sounds less like a basic feature and more like a lost democratic ideal. You opened the app, saw the latest posts from the people you followed and eventually reached a photo you had already seen. Then you closed Instagram and went on with your day. Imagine.

Back then, if you wanted to see more from someone, you had to, well, follow them. The logic was painfully simple: the more followers a person had, the more influential they were considered. One million followers meant one million people had actively requested your presence in their lives, or at least your holiday photos and overnight oats.

Then, in 2016, Instagram replaced its chronological feed with an algorithmic one, prompting one of the sweetest internet battles of the decade. Creators posted dramatic “turn on notifications” graphics. Users begged the platform not to change. Instagram did it anyway, arguing that people were missing around 70 per cent of the posts in their feeds. The algorithmic feed was rolled out globally in June 2016.

That was probably the beginning of the end for the follow button. We just didn't know it yet.

As Instagram became commercially useful, follower count turned into a wonderfully convenient measurement of human value. Brands, agencies and media outlets could look at the number beneath a username and decide how important someone was without undergoing the exhausting process of examining their actual work.

10,000 followers made you a micro-influencer. 100,000 made you a serious person. One million meant you could launch a moisturiser.

Naturally, people began buying followers.

At first, the fakes were easy to recognise: empty profiles, strange usernames, no posts and an apparently passionate commitment to following 8,000 strangers. Later, sellers became more sophisticated, delivering followers gradually to make the growth appear organic.

In 2019, research cited by Wired estimated that fake followers would cost advertisers approximately $1.3 billion that year, while around 95 million Instagram accounts were thought to be fake. The investigation also described “drip followers”, delivered in small batches over hundreds of days.

The exact scale of the problem today is difficult to calculate. Bots have become more convincing, detection methods vary and not every suspicious follower was deliberately purchased. Fake accounts can follow people without their knowledge, while inactive users remain in audience totals long after abandoning the app.

Still, fake engagement hasn't disappeared. It has merely acquired better profile pictures and AI-generated comments saying, “This is so insightful!”

You can buy followers, likes, comments and views. The numbers may look more natural now, but the basic problem remains: a large audience and a real audience aren't necessarily the same thing.

The Explore page had already weakened the relationship between following and discovery. Paid promotion allowed accounts to purchase visibility. Cross-promotion flourished after Stories appeared and everyone began recommending their friends, business partners and suspiciously photogenic dentists.

Then came Reels, and Instagram became television.

The platform was no longer primarily a place where you looked at posts from people you had chosen. It became an entertainment service where an algorithm chose on your behalf.

There isn't even one single Instagram algorithm. Feed, Stories, Explore and Reels all use different ranking systems. Meta explains that these systems predict whether someone will watch, like, save, share or otherwise interact with a piece of content.

The traditional feed is still there, technically. I scroll through perhaps ten posts before it begins to resemble a poorly organised charity shop: one friend, one advertisement, a suggested Reel about cortisol, another advertisement and somebody I followed after meeting once in 2019.

The actual entertainment happens in Reels.

According to Sensor Tower estimates reported by The Wall Street Journal, the average Instagram user was spending around 27 minutes a day watching Reels by 2026. For comparison, YouTube Shorts users spent 21 minutes on the format, while TikTok remained ahead at 44 minutes. The same report described Reels as a business generating more than $50 billion in annual revenue for Meta.

People now watch, like, share, save and comment on a creator’s Reels without following the account.

And really, why would they bother?

Following requires visiting the profile, looking around and pressing a button. Liking requires moving one finger approximately three millimetres. More importantly, people know that if they watch and like one video, Instagram will probably show them more content from the same creator, or at least another person discussing the same extremely specific subject.

The algorithm has registered their interest. The paperwork is no longer necessary.

In 2025, Instagram head Adam Mosseri identified watch time, likes and sends as the three main ranking signals creators should monitor. Likes tend to matter more when content is shown to existing followers, while sends are particularly valuable for reaching people who don't follow the account.

If you watch a creator’s Reel, like it and send it to your group chat with the caption “us”, Instagram learns something useful. If you repeat this behaviour, the platform has every reason to show you that creator again.

You receive the content without making the relationship official. It is, essentially, a situationship with a home-renovation blogger.

This creates an audience that follower count can't properly show: people who recognise your face, understand your jokes and send your videos to friends, but have never followed you. They may be far more active than thousands of people who subscribed five years ago for a giveaway and haven't thought about you since.

The algorithm hasn't made Instagram more predictable. Quite the opposite.

A video filmed in four minutes while waiting for a taxi can reach two million people. A carefully planned Reel involving a location permit, a lighting assistant and seventeen rounds of edits can reach 846, several of whom work in your office.

One week, the internet wants thoughtful explanations with tasteful subtitles. The next, it has collectively decided that success depends on performing a creepy little dance invented somewhere beyond the reach of public transport.

You can buy followers. You can buy views. You can pay Instagram to place your content in front of people. What you can't reliably buy is organic virality: the precise combination of timing, relevance and inexplicable online chemistry that makes thousands of people decide somebody else urgently needs to see the same video.

That uncertainty is exhausting, but it has also made Instagram slightly more democratic. A small creator can reach millions, while an account with one million followers can post directly into the void. The follower count is still visible, but it no longer defines the ceiling.

Yes. Let's not hold a funeral while the patient is still posting Stories.

Follower count continues to provide social proof. It helps brands estimate the potential scale of a collaboration, influences creator categories and fees, and reassures clients who would prefer one impressive number to a complicated conversation about retention and audience quality.

This still matters in the GCC, where Instagram has an enormous commercial audience. Meta’s advertising data indicated that Instagram could reach approximately 8.05 million people in the UAE in late 2025, equivalent to around 70.5 per cent of the population.

Regional marketers are also investing more in creators. According to a MENA influencer-marketing report, 76.9 per cent of surveyed UAE marketers considered influencer marketing a top priority, while 46.2 per cent were increasing their budgets. The same research found that 61.5 per cent of MENA brands ran fewer than five influencer campaigns annually.

However, follower count is increasingly only the beginning of the conversation.

Brands want to know who watches, where they live, whether they share, how long they stay and whether the creator can produce something that doesn't look like a hostage video with a discount code.

Original formats matter. Tone of voice matters. Audience relevance matters. A creator with 20,000 attentive followers in Dubai may be more useful to a local restaurant than someone with 500,000 followers scattered around the world and no particular interest in leaving the house.

UGC has complicated the hierarchy further. Brands now pay creators to produce content for the brand’s own channels and advertisements, sometimes without asking them to post it on their personal profiles at all. Here, the brand is buying the creator’s ideas and ability to make advertising look vaguely natural, not access to their followers.

Deloitte’s 2025 State of Social research advised brands to use creators and user-generated content to build trust, improve social shopping and reduce production costs. A person with 3,000 followers can therefore be commercially valuable. They just need taste, skill and the ability to say, “I genuinely love this serum,” with the conviction of a courtroom witness.

None of this means that creators should stop building an audience. Followers provide a base of people who may see their work repeatedly. They can become a community, buy tickets, read newsletters and support projects beyond the life expectancy of one successful Reel.

But follower conversion shouldn't be the only measure of whether content worked.

Personally, I reserve subscriptions for the most important accounts: people whose full range of content genuinely interests me. If one Reel makes me laugh, I may like it. If five make me laugh, I may remember the creator’s name. If I also want their breakfast opinions, Stories from the taxi and occasional emotional crisis, then I will follow.

In the era of content hygiene, or at least an era when we have finally started discussing it, that seems perfectly healthy. My feed doesn't need to become a storage unit for every person who has entertained me once.

So, creators, stop demanding a follow at the end of every Reel. Give people some space. Make something distinctive enough that they recognise it before checking the username.

Don't make people follow you. Make them return to you.

Better yet, make them remember your name.