This morning as I was pursuing the Adult Industry news on AVN and XBiz; I came across a News Release from Cam Company Chaturbate. The release has Chaturbate bragging about reaching (and surpassing) 100,000 Twitter followers, with lovely quotes from their Chief of Operations, Shirley Lara. As we all know this is a topic near and dear to my heart and has been at the core of story busting we’ve done here at Tattle.XXX over the years… In fact I thought we’d done such a decent job outting people that bought Twitter followers that the practice had gone underground and no one was really silly enough to buy 50,000+ followers and then run around putting out Press Releases and bragging about essentially just spending money…
Well looks as though I was wrong again… The article intrigued me for two reasons the first because who really thinks 100,000 followers is really any big deal any more and second how or why a Cam company would reach such lofty levels when they mostly ReTweet messages from their own models. With little surprise what good old TwitterCounter.com showed was a pattern of weirdness in the follower stats for the last six months; a nice and steady increase of an average of 130 new followers each and every day. As we’ve discussed before that in itself isn’t a clear indicator of abuse; but when original tweets are few and far between things start to look bleak. We’ll let you draw your own conclusions from this TwitterCounter chart:
In the Social Media industry we call this type of Twitter Follower buy a trickle; it’s less noticeable to consumers (and Twitter) than the old jumping 50,000 followers in a day; but it’s just as telling if you can see the stats over a long period of time. The data here is substantiated by the type of Tweets you can see on Chaturbate; which are on the bulk ReTweets of other original Tweets. Additionally you’d typically see some other activity like Chaturbate following or interacting with more Twitter users; or some big news spikes in follower count… but their following numbers stay relatively the same in the six month period (a small 2,029); you’d expect they’d at least be following some of their own models during that period to help grow this 100k followers.
Draw your own conclusions from the data… but here at Tattle we’re going to have to show the “Big Fat Phony” video again…