You can buy a social media account. Or sell yours

NewsIndia NewsYou can buy a social media account. Or sell yours When an account looks believable, it is something of a prize, but for those with legitimate or non-legitimate reasons. You could blame the bots. Someone’s asking for Rs 6.7 lakh to sell an India-based Instagram account with just 7,000 followers, a description that goes “Rajputi reel uploaded”, and 54 posts made in the one year it has existed.It’s a bit of an outsized ask, but not as preposterous as you might imagine.

Social media accounts — entire accounts, not followers — have been bought and sold on grey markets for at least a decade and a half. The influencer economy helped. Once audiences could be monetised, followers and engagement acquired a fairly literal value.

But, at the same time, bots made followers cheap and accounts easy to manufacture at scale. People could — and often still can — tell when it’s all fake. They may or may not care, but they can tell.So, when an account looks believable — with the odd little follower base, the awkward posts, and the occasional little viral bump — it is something of a prize.If someone wants the account for legitimate purposes, such as the launch of a new brand, it can shorten the wait to qualify for monetisation and other gated features.

And if they want it for absolutely-not-legitimate reasons, such as scams, the account’s history gives them quicker (and easier) credibility.See the difference here. Here a buyer can sort accounts by, among other things, price, follower count, and place of follower concentration.

“I am from Patna, Bihar”, a profile on a marketplace says. And they’re offering a “3M Indian Facebook page for sale” — a Facebook page with 3 million followers. The asking price on the July listing is $4,500 — about Rs 4.3 lakh.

It might almost seem like a bargain, given the large-ish following (but there’s also the declining page views whose screenshots the seller has added, perhaps in the spirit of transparency, to consider). It’s some $0.0015, about Re 0.14, per follower.The same seller also offered a “baby”-focused Facebook page with “10k followers organic views”, meaning the reach came without paid promotion, in Aug.

The largest following is in India (39%), going by the screenshots posted in the listing, and it offers two valuable things. The first is “content monetisation”, meaning access to Facebook’s system for earning money from eligible content, which a new page would otherwise have to spend time building towards and qualifying for.

The other is the ability to run the page “with your desired name”, meaning the page can be renamed and repurposed for a new brand or identity. For this small page, the seller is asking for $150 — a bit under Rs 14,400. This works out to about $0.015, or Rs 1.44, per follower.It’s a neat 10 times the asking price of the larger account, if we go purely by follower count.This means follower count isn’t really what is always being sold.

The history, audience, activity, monetisation, and ability to repurpose the account can often matter much more. The original email, for instance, holds value because it can be part of the account-recovery trail, and buyers worry that a previous owner who retains it could later reclaim the account.A dedicated marketplace It’s definitely much easier to ‘sell’ your social media account today than it was a decade ago.

It’s not all crude or iffy websites and message boards anymore. There are dedicated marketplaces for buying and selling social media accounts that are incredibly organised.SeBuDA, where the Rs 6.7 lakh asking-price Instagram account is listed, is a good example.

A buyer can sort accounts by price, follower count, the country and city where followers are concentrated, their gender, the account’s category and age, and whether the original email address comes with it. The listing itself often shows audience demographics, analytics, recent posts, engagement numbers — many of these screenshots — alongside seller history and escrow record.

Accounts can even be put on a comparison list.Similarly, Fameswap — which has been around since 2013 and is now one of the biggest dedicated marketplaces for social media accounts — has a price-discovery mechanism. Its market insights data shows that YouTube accounts that put out reviews and how-to videos are priced the highest (a median asking price of more than $60 for every thousand followers).

For TikTok accounts, the sweet spot is crypto and NFTs (about $40). And for Instagram accounts, it’s tech and science ($19). An India-tagged Facebook account with 3 million subscribers on sale, a large market that's been operating since 2017 Another major market, DealBaron, has an even more formalised process.

When a seller lists an account, the site pulls in basic account data and asks them to prove they control it by posting a generated code on that account. Buyers can see seller ratings and deal histories, make binding offers and, once a deal starts, follow a platform-specific handover process inside DealBaron.SWAPD, also a large market that has been operating since 2017, looks more like a forum than these sites, but the transactions are tightly managed — and “under continuous human supervision”, rather than through automated checkouts.

SWAPD says it reviews listings before they go live, and that it requires sellers handling qualifying transactions to complete KYC identity checks.As for the money, most of these markets either offer or require escrow, where the buyer’s money is held by the platform or an escrow service until the account has been transferred.The way it works makes it easier for sellers to build inventories and for buyers to shop for exactly the sort of account they want.

And, for a buyer, several smaller accounts might presumably make more sense than putting everything into one page with an enormous following: if one is suspended, reclaimed or lost, the entire “investment” doesn’t sink. India remains the leading country after US as buyer on the...