Demand for social media accounts in January-June increased three to four times in 2023

According to the data of platforms and services trading accounts in Russian and foreign social networks, the demand for acquiring active pages in 2023 increased three to four times, and the number of offers almost doubled. Trading platforms believe that the trend is associated with the growing interest of Russians in anonymity on the Internet, but experts in the advertising market and popular publics in social networks say that accounts are often used for political provocations and sending spam messages. Social media moderators claim to block such accounts. But their number remains high.

As Kommersant was told in the Buy-accs service, the demand for accounts in social networks in January-June increased three to four times compared to the same period last year: “This mainly concerns VKontakte and blocked Twitter, Instagram and Facebook (The activities of the parent company of the last two Meta services in Russia have been recognized as extremist and banned.— “b”)”. Also, Buy-accs clarified, this year many foreign accounts of VPN services that “have not yet been blocked in Russia” have become popular. Absolute figures are not disclosed in the service.

According to the 4Cheat store, the number of offers to sell Telegram accounts has doubled, and offers to purchase an active VKontakte page have grown by one and a half times. The annual turnover of the entire market (from June 2022 to June 2023) was estimated at 4Cheat at the level of 10 billion rubles.

A representative of Buy-accs believes that the increase in demand for acquiring accounts was influenced by the growing interest of Russians in anonymity on the Internet: “Most often, people sit in social networks from anonymous accounts, leaving their blocked or lost pages.” Many use purchased accounts to register on forums or other sites, he adds.

According to the service, the cost of an account on the VKontakte social network is from 18 rubles. up to 249.3 thousand rubles, and in Telegram – from 18 kopecks. up to 390 thousand rubles According to the interlocutor of Kommersant on one of the specialized sites, the cost of a page “depends on its characteristics, the degree of processing, the price is also affected by general inflation, together with the complexity of the account creation process.” “For example, an account on VKontakte used to cost 50 kopecks, but now the same account will cost 25 rubles,” the Kommersant source clarifies.

Accounts can be bought for the purpose of political provocations or sending spam messages with the promotion of dubious services, says the operating director of the Piccher advertising agency (among the clients are VK, Yandex, Tinkoff, Ozon, Russian Railways, etc.) Pavel Astakhov. According to him, this problem is observed in all projects that the agency maintains in social networks: “The number of bots in the comments increased by the end of 2022, the peak was in January 2023.” Mr. Astakhov claims that earlier one or two spam messages a week came to the agency’s projects, but now 10-20 spam comments appear daily: “Mostly these are financial pyramids or self-development courses.”

The problem is confirmed by the author of the Telegram channel about the alcohol market “Drunk Master” Denis Puzyrev: “Since March-April 2022, we have faced a huge number of spam bot attacks, which are divided into advertising marketplaces and links to channels with a military theme.” According to him, the channel’s support staff cleans up about 120 spam messages a day, but “it doesn’t help much.”

Telecom operators also faced regular publications of bots. Vimpelcom said that most often such accounts are involved in the publication of provocative messages, advertising services or dubious earnings, as well as for the sake of participating in contests held by the operator on the official page of VKontakte. MegaFon confirmed that they are facing spam in social networks.

Social networks may intentionally not block accounts or groups that bring in money, the source of Kommersant in the Russian IT market believes. According to him, in response to numerous complaints about spam messages and groups with dubious content, VKontakte moderators often suggest contacting Roskomnadzor, although they themselves have all the rights to block the page. The social network itself, however, assured that in the audience statistics of VKontakte, “such accounts have never been taken into account and are not taken into account, since they are considered inactive users,” and the moderation service “always promptly blocks them.”

Vadim Krasnikov