Anyone that has looked at any of my statistics posts before (here) will know that I like a good spreadsheet.

Back in October I did another quick round up of follower/subscriber accounts, to look at the potential impact of the Riyadh Comedy Festival (here). But there is something more going on and I suspect it’s related to the UK Online Safety Bill and the domino effect of all the social platforms trying to head off massive fines (by demanding age verification).

X / Twitter

X has been probably the worst one for losses and this Exploding Topics page says that 1.7m bots were removed in October alone. I’m assuming the bot accounts have no way of proving they are over 18…give ‘em time.

The names are not important (in this context) but, back in July, there were 13 accounts (belonging to US/UK comedians) that had grown by a collective 194,462 followers in about 8 weeks.

Fast-forward to November 4^th and that same group had collectively lost -90-447. And, by November 7^th, this had increased to -218,285. In all the time that I’ve been looking at this data that’s a -ve trend that I’ve not seen before.

Another perspective…

I’d rejigged the group (of whose accounts I do comparisons on) on October 20th, and baselined my list of 28. At that point they had collectively added 605,035 X followers.

On November 7^th that same group’s number had changed to -998,674. So that’s a 1.6m change right there.

Instagram

Instagram is less dramatic but these 28 accounts had collective followers of 283,473,168 on October 20^th and that had dropped by -72,434 on November 7^th.

Facebook

Numbers for Facebook are less precise. Using Boomsocial I can see exact numbers for a small number of accounts – others I can only see to the closest 100k.

But my counting methods are the same each time so it’s of interest to see that on October 11^th these 28 had 125,653,614 between them.

On October 20^th that number was down by -1.3m

TikTok

TikTok appears to have slightly bucked the trend in that some have decreased – but some have increased. More data needed on that one.

YouTube

Ditto YouTube which is overall up 308k. One possible difference here is that YouTube’s upward growth seems to be a steeper chart than that for TikTok, because of a user behavioural difference.

I suspect that people use TikTok more for mindless scrolling of shorts and someone that wants to follow a specific comedian would go to their YouTube account and subscribe. Just a theory.

Summary

It may be some time before we see the full impact of platforms introducing age verification etc. Personally, if something starts demanding my passport (or even facial recognition) and it’s not something that I use a lot or deem high value – then it’s toast.

But it looks like the new rules are helping clear out bots and this seems to be impacting the bigger names more. Especially those that have had accounts for many years.

What muddies the water is that new followers coming on may be masking some of the losses. So, this post is just remarking on a trend that I spotted and which will impact the stats that I intended assembling at year end (of account / channel growth).

And I do like a spreadsheet…