Dive Brief:

• Following an Instagram purge of spammy followers that had marketers worried, top brands have emerged mostly unscarred. 
• No brand on the top 100 list lost more than 5% of its followers—except for Instagram itself which lost 29%. 
• Celebrities were hit the hardest, like the reigning king Justin Bieber, who lost 5 million followers in the purge, making Kim Kardashian the new ruler of Instagram. Kardashian lost 1.3 million in the purge as well. 

Dive Insight: 

The purge is good news for top brands. Now brands can be more certain the followers on the platform are real people that can be engaged. It's bad news for celebrities that use follower numbers as a commodity to negotiate brand deals—a practice that has become commonplace on Instagram. Overall, ridding the platform of spam accounts will be good for all sides in the long run, after all, no one wants to market to bots.