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If you are a popular TV show, your social tv rating ends up in your Nielsen reports, enabling you to charge more for advertising. Ad agency gets paid for their promotional work, etc.

As an individual with lots of followers, you could advertise paid gigs, like "I will mention your product to my 100k followers for $10". Then somebody like Kim Kardashian can charge $100k or more per "endorsement".

There's a whole vaporware "value chain" here.

The more followers you have, the greater your social status.

There's a very real benefit to having a lot of followers.

The user withdavidle posted this above, which is a great article: https://medium.com/i-data/fake-friends-with-real-benefits-ee...