Lurk Data Report · Updated July 3, 2026
The State of Instagram Following 2026
Across 2,021,740 mapped Instagram follow relationships and 402,113 tracked follow-activity events, the median observed account has just 569 followers while the mean is 215,876 — a 379× gap that makes Instagram following one of the most extreme power-law distributions in consumer social. 92.1% of accounts sit under 10,000 followers, and across observed activity, new follows outnumber confirmed unfollows 253:1.
By Lurk · Original research · CC BY 4.0 · Cite this report
Key figures at a glance
The complete headline dataset, captured July 3, 2026. Every figure below is an exact count from Lurk’s production follow-graph — not an estimate.
| Instagram profiles observed | 123,744 |
| Follow relationships mapped | 2,021,740 |
| Follow-activity events tracked | 402,113 |
| Accounts under active tracking | 1,504 |
| Median follower count | 569 |
| Mean follower count | 215,876 |
| 90th-percentile follower count | 6,101 |
| 99th-percentile follower count | 1,385,496 |
| Activity events, last 7 days | 71,665 |
| Activity events, last 30 days | 285,644 |
1. The follow economy is an extreme power law
The typical Instagram account is far smaller than averages imply: the median observed account has 569 followers, but the mean is 215,876 — 379× higher. A handful of accounts with hundreds of millions of followers drag the average up by two orders of magnitude, while 92.1% of all observed accounts have fewer than 10,000 followers. Averages are the wrong lens for Instagram; percentiles tell the truth.
| Follower percentile | Followers |
|---|---|
| Median (50th percentile) | 569 |
| 90th percentile | 6,101 |
| 99th percentile | 1,385,496 |
| Mean (average) | 215,876 |
| Largest account observed | 685,868,818 |
The creator-size pyramid
Grouping every observed account by follower count shows the pyramid explicitly. Share is of the 121,313 accounts with a known follower count.
2. What follow activity actually looks like
Of 402,113 tracked follow-activity events, 53.0% were new follows and 46.7% were new followers gained — confirmed unfollows were just 842 events, or 0.39% of all follow/unfollow actions. Instagram following is overwhelmingly additive: people follow far more than they unfollow.
| Event type | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| New follows made | 213,260 | 53.03% |
| New followers gained | 187,834 | 46.71% |
| Confirmed unfollows | 842 | 0.21% |
| New stories detected | 177 | 0.04% |
3. How often do people actually unfollow?
There are two honest ways to measure this, and they answer different questions. Lurk reports both, side by side, with their caveats — because a single “unfollow rate” without a denominator is meaningless.
Of every follow-or-unfollow action in the live activity feed, only 0.39% were unfollows (253:1 follow-to-unfollow). This is a deliberately conservative floor: an unfollow is only counted after the anti-flap state machine confirms a sustained disappearance, so transient drops are excluded.
Of the 39,219 follow relationships that have reached a terminal, fully-confirmed state, 14.28% ended in a confirmed unfollow. This measures relationship durability rather than event volume, on the subset of edges observed enough times to resolve.
A quieter finding sits inside the churn: relationships pointing at verified accounts make up 25.6% of still-active follows but only 21.6% of confirmed unfollows — people hold onto follows of verified and celebrity accounts at a modestly higher rate than they hold onto everyday accounts.
4. Verification and privacy
Only 4.6% of observed accounts are verified and 9.3% are private — the vast majority of Instagram, 90.7%, is public and unverified. Verification is concentrated almost entirely at the top: in the 10M-plus celebrity tier, 97.7% of accounts carry a verified badge.
| Attribute | Accounts | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Public accounts | 112,284 | 90.7% |
| Private accounts | 11,460 | 9.3% |
| Verified accounts | 5,747 | 4.6% |
| Verified within 10M+ tier | 428 | 97.7% |
5. The most-watched accounts on Instagram
Cristiano Ronaldo (@cristiano) tops the watch list — the single most-tracked account in the network — and is the most-followed person on Instagram, behind only Instagram’s own platform account. Demand to watchan account’s following activity (the first table) tracks closely with raw follower size (the second) — but not perfectly. Elon Musk and MrBeast draw watch-demand well above their follower rank.
| # | Most-tracked account |
|---|---|
| 1 | @cristiano |
| 2 | @leomessi |
| 3 | @kyliejenner |
| 4 | @kimkardashian |
| 5 | @taylorswift |
| 6 | @elonmusk |
| 7 | @selenagomez |
| 8 | @therock |
| 9 | @mrbeast |
| 10 | @neymarjr |
| Most-followed account | Followers |
|---|---|
| 685.9M | |
| @cristiano | 670.3M |
| @leomessi | 511.2M |
| @selenagomez | 405.1M |
| @kyliejenner | 382.3M |
| @therock | 382.2M |
| @arianagrande | 363.4M |
| @kimkardashian | 344M |
| @beyonce | 300.1M |
| @khloekardashian | 292.6M |
6. How many accounts do people follow?
The median observed account follows 399 others; the mean is 727, and the 90th percentile is 1,702. Outbound following is far more tightly distributed than inbound followers — most people curate a following list in the low hundreds, even as follower counts fan out across six orders of magnitude.
| Following (outbound) percentile | Accounts followed |
|---|---|
| Median (50th percentile) | 399 |
| Mean (average) | 727 |
| 90th percentile | 1,702 |
Methodology & limitations
Data source.Every figure in this report is derived from Lurk’s production follow-graph: 123,744 Instagram profiles observed via public data, 2,099,483 directional follow-graph relationships stored in a CRDT-style, anti-flap follow-edge store, and 402,113 follow-activity events logged through the live Follow Index pipeline. Profile counts, follower/following percentiles, verification and privacy rates come from aggregate queries over that store; the activity mix comes 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.
Sampling & limitations. This is not a random sample of all of Instagram. The observed set skews toward accounts that have been searched, tracked, or that appear in the public follow-graphs Lurk mirrors, which tilts the distribution toward higher-follower and more frequently-referenced accounts. The follower/following percentiles describe the accounts Lurk has observed, not the global Instagram population. Figures reflect a single snapshot captured July 3, 2026 and are refreshed periodically.
| Profile data provenance | Profiles |
|---|---|
| The Ick mirror (public follow-graph) | 105,818 |
| Parasitic public-HTML cache | 17,565 |
| Auto-injected seed accounts | 360 |
| Instapeep Proxy Backfill 20260520 | 1 |
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/report/state-of-instagram-following-2026
Lurk. “The State of Instagram Following 2026.” July 3, 2026. https://getlurk.app/report/state-of-instagram-following-2026
Journalists and researchers: for a custom cut of this dataset, or the underlying time-series, see the live Follow Index or the atomic single-stat data pages.
Lurk builds this dataset by tracking Instagram following activity for its users. See what Lurk tracks →