Lurk Monthly Data Drop · August 2026 · Updated September 22, 2026
Instagram Following: August 2026 Data Report
Across the Instagram accounts Lurk actively tracked in August 2026, 218 unfollows were confirmed — that is one confirmed unfollow every 204.8 minutes, a deliberately conservative floor that only counts a sustained, anti-flap-confirmed disappearance. In the same month, new follows outran unfollows 11,927:1, and the median observed account follows just 478 accounts while the mean is 883.
By Lurk, Original research · CC BY 4.0 · Cite this report
Most people maintain a carefully curated list of accounts they follow, reflecting their interests and preferences. Unfollowing is often a subtle, intentional act, done thoughtfully rather than as a sudden or impulsive decision.
1. How often people actually unfollow
In August 2026, Lurk confirmed 218 unfollows across the accounts it tracked — an average of 7.0 per day, or one every 204.8 minutes. Unfollowing is a quiet, deliberate act, not a mass purge: over the same month Lurk confirmed 2,600,173 new follows, so people added far more than they dropped (11,927:1). Every count here is a conservative floor — an unfollow is only recorded after the anti-flap state machine confirms a sustained disappearance, so transient drops are excluded.
| August 2026 follow-graph movement | Edges |
|---|---|
| Confirmed new follows | 2,600,173 |
| Confirmed unfollows | 218 |
| Newly observed (awaiting confirmation) | 2,403,049 |
| Began disappearing (unconfirmed) | 5,340 |
2. How many accounts do people follow?
The median observed account follows 478 others; the mean is 883 — just 1.8× higher — and 74.7% of accounts follow fewer than 1,000. Outbound following is one of the most tightly-distributed numbers on Instagram: even as follower counts fan out across six orders of magnitude, almost everyone curates a following list in the low hundreds. Only 2.1% of accounts follow more than 5,000.
| Following (outbound) percentile | Accounts followed |
|---|---|
| Median (50th percentile) | 478 |
| Mean (average) | 883 |
| 90th percentile | 2,033 |
| 99th percentile | 6,909 |
| Most-following account observed | 139,812 |
The following-size pyramid
Grouping every observed account by how many others it follows. Share is of the a large sample of accounts with a known following count.
3. What people keep following — and drop
9% of August’s new follows pointed at a verified account, versus 1.4% of that month’s unfollows. The gap is small but consistent: relationships pointing at verified and celebrity accounts are added at a modestly higher rate than they are dropped — people hold onto follows of verified accounts a little more tightly than everyday ones.
| August 2026 confirmed action | Edges | Target verified | Target private |
|---|---|---|---|
| New follows | 2,600,173 | 9% | 35.3% |
| Unfollows | 218 | 1.4% | 40.8% |
The network behind these numbers
August 2026’s movements were observed inside Lurk’s live follow-graph, the same anti-flap store that powers the public Follow Index.
| Follow relationships analyzed | 2M+ |
|---|
Methodology & limitations
Data source. Every figure in this report is derived from Lurk’s production follow-graph. Monthly follow / unfollow counts come from aggregate queries over the follow_edges store, counting edges whose state changed to a confirmed active (a new follow) or removed (an unfollow) within August 2026. Following-count percentiles come from aggregate queries over a large sample of observed Instagram profiles; the network totals come from the same get_follow_index aggregation the public Follow Index publishes.
Anti-flap counting. A relationship is only promoted to a confirmed state after repeated consistent observations, and an unfollow is only counted after a sustained disappearance is confirmed. This makes every count in this report a conservative floor — it under-reports rather than over-reports churn, by design, and the “one unfollow every 204.8 minutes” cadence is therefore a minimum.
Sampling & scope. This is not a random sample of all of Instagram. The month’s follow / unfollow counts describe the accounts Lurk actively tracked in August 2026, and the following-count percentiles describe the accounts Lurk has observed — a set that skews toward searched, tracked and frequently-referenced accounts. Figures reflect data captured September 22, 2026 and are published as a monthly edition.
Cite this report
This report and its underlying dataset are released free under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Reuse any figure with attribution to Lurk and a link to the permalink:
https://getlurk.app/data-drop/instagram-following-august-2026
Lurk. “Instagram Following: August 2026 Data Report.” September 22, 2026. https://getlurk.app/data-drop/instagram-following-august-2026
Journalists and researchers: for the live time-series or a custom cut, see the Follow Index, the flagship State of Instagram Following 2026 report, or the atomic single-stat data pages.
Lurk builds this dataset by tracking Instagram following activity for its users. See what Lurk tracks →