Influencers are the new silver bullet of eCommerce. The global influencer marketing industry will spend up to 10 billion US dollars in 2020. With a return of five to six Bucks for a single Dollar spent on influencers, the market keeps growing. 19 percent of asked marketers will spend 1,000 – 10,000 US dollars per year on influencer marketing and others are spending much more.

And this is no wonder. With 70 percent of teens trusting influencers, and 49 percent of consumers buying what these influencers recommend, 17 percent of companies spend over half their marketing budget on influencers. The leading channels for successful influencers are Instagram, YouTube, and blog posts.

But there is a more hidden side of influencers. They all have secrets and hide things of their professional business. One big thing is bots, that create followers automatically. These artificial follower accounts push the popularity of the influencers using them. That has created 95 million fake followers on Instagram so far.

Being an influencer is hard work and a professional job. So, the natural appearing beautiful pictures are not always natural, but carefully arranged and post processed. Some more cheesy influencers use methods like loop giveaways, in combination with “ghost”, and fake engagement to grow their fame and followership.