Sometimes I honestly feel exhausted having to repeatedly explain such ridiculous misinfo.
Now open Instagram, and search for any celebrity fanpage that comes to mind. It could be B*llie E*lish, Card*B, or even newly created official accounts—any account with a large following but no verification badge will do. That’s because only then can you actually browse their followers.
Go into their followers list and search for what u keep calling the so-called “Animal Farm”: gecko, giraffe, tiger… and so on. You’ll quickly notice—these animal names are everywhere.
That’s because usernames in the format of “animal + numbers” are automatically generated default handles by Meta (the company behind Instagram and Threads) starting from a certain point in time. When new users register, the system assigns these names by default.
Instead of claiming that all these accounts mentioned above bought so-called bots, it’s more accurate to admit that there are simply plenty of users in the world who can’t be bothered to change their usernames.
Honestly, it gets frustrating having to explain such basic, common-sense things over and over.
How long it takes for ppl to understand: The 2 million plus sales of mini7 are NOT all real end-user sales. A portion of them were essentially “loaned” through these fansign platforms. Later, these platforms hold fansigns to resell the albums to fans and make up the numbers.
Right now, the sales “borrowed” from yzy haven’t been fully paid back yet, so they have to keep running fansigns until fans spend enough to actually purchase all those albums. In this sense, Heeseung is basically being used to fill the gap in the group’s album sales.
This kind of “loaned sales” tactic has been going on in K-pop for years and CN fansigns are being the end-consumers of these loans.
What’s shocking is that hardly anyone talks about it, and everything is made to look as if every fansign is generating new revenue. NO IT ISNT.