A ‘Byron Baes’ Investigation: Did Jade Really Buy His Instagram Followers?

A successful reality show needs two things to thrive: events and drama. Ideally the drama happens at an event, thus causing the most chaos. Netflix’s new docu-soap Byron Baes knows this and never fails to deliver events that are full of face-to-face confrontations that, in the humdrum realities of us mere viewers, would have just happened over text. Episode 3 of Byron Baes, cheekily named “Big in Turkey,” gives us one of the first truly epic reading sessions of 2022 when influencer Jade Kevin Foster completely gathers talent manager Alex Reid. This heated moment comes after a few episodes of buildup; upon first meeting in Episode 1, Alex thought something felt off about Jade’s Instagram account. After doing some digging, Alex discovered that 451,000 of Jade’s 1.2 million Instagram followers come… from Turkey.

Considering that the drama around Jade’s Instagram account fully eats up four episodes of Byron Baes and the storyline ends with — SPOILER ALERT — a very uneasy truce between Alex and Jade, you probably want to know if Jade Kevin Foster really did buy his Instagram followers. Since the show offers no conclusions about Jade’s followers, it’s impossible to know the truth about his 1.2 million best friends unless you’re a psychic. But while mind reading is not my forte, Google sleuthing sorta is… and this mystery intrigues me.

First, there’s the Turkey of it all. If the whole notion of someone buying followers is blowing your mind, you should watch the HBO doc Fake Famous. The filmmaker takes a couple of randos with meager-to-no Instagram following and, just by dropping dollars, turns them into legit influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers and numerous sponsorship deals. And one of the things the doc points out, something that Alex knows, is that a lot of fake accounts come from countries in the Middle East. This is why when Jade’s new bud Sarah asks Alex if it’s possible Jade just has “a big audience from Turkey,” Alex has to restrain himself from laughing. Like, sure, it is possible that almost half of Australian fashion/beauty influencer Jade’s following comes from Turkey, just like Jade having 7 followers from another planet is possible. Possible is not the same as likely.

It’s also wild that, when you look at the report Alex and his assistant have pulled up, the other top countries are the United States and Iran. Australia, Jade’s home country, comes in fourth! Yes, Jade says he’s traveled the world, but… how much time has he spent in Turkey and Iran…?

But whatever — the location of Jade’s followers isn’t the only metric in play. Surely if Jade has a massive fanbase, that would be reflected in Google Trends. Interest in influencers extends outside of Instagram — and also a lot of people probably get to Jade’s Instagram by searching for “jade kevin foster.” So I compared search engine trends in Australia for Jade Kevin Foster with some Australian personalities: beauty influencer Lauren Curtis (@lozcurtis; 1.2M followers), influencer Chloe Morello (@chloemorello; 1.1M followers), RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under runner-up Art Simone (@rtist_; 210K followers), and Yummy Mummies star Lorinska Merrington (@lorinska; 735K followers).

So, good news and bad news for Jade: he can probably expect a sizable spike in attention now that Byron Baes is out, similar to the ones Art Simone and Lorinska Merrington got when their shows premiered. The bad news: Jade’s internet reach doesn’t come close to Curtis or Morello, two people with roughly the same Insta following. You can really see how they compare when you zoom in on just the past year.

The weird thing is, Jade hypes himself up during his clapback to Alex, going in on how hard he’s worked to build his brand and his audience, etc. etc. But as of publication… Jade’s posted 4 times in 2022. By comparison, Curtis has posted 9 times and Morello has posted 24 times. And if you look back to 2021, Jade posted 12 times to his grid. That’s roughly one Instagram post a month! Now, maybe Jade lives in his stories, or maybe Jade did a social media purge when Byron Baes was announced. I don’t know — I simply don’t have those numbers.

I do, however, have numbers for the fluctuations in Jade’s follower count over the past couple years thanks to Social Blade (which seems to be the free equivalent of what Alex used to dig up his stats). There are a few instances over the past 3 years of Jade gaining or losing between 30K to 100K followers in a short timespan, but nothing compares to what happened in April 2021.

Yeah, Jade gained and then lost almost 1.4M followers! Something like that probably only happens if a person has a major breakout moment and then immediately milkshake ducks. But as you can see in the Google Trend graphs above, Jade didn’t have a breakout moment in April 2021, at least not one that caused people to google “who is jade kevin foster.” He was in the news, though: April 2021 is when Netflix announced Byron Baes and stirred up a ton of controversy in the Byron area over fears that the city would be depicted, uh, exactly as it is depicted in Byron Baes.

Still, it’s not likely that Jade doubled his following just from his name being included in a list of cast members. We only have to look at fellow Byron bae Nathan to see what an organic bump in followers looks like. Two years before Byron Baes was announced, Social Blade shows that Nathan gained 20.6K Instagram followers in a month. Why? Because that’s when he debuted as a cast member on Bachelor in Paradise Australia Season 2.

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That’s the kind of bump you get from debuting on a big TV show, so Jade’s bump from the Byron Baes announcement should have probably been a fraction of that number instead of 67x that number.

So what conclusion can I reach that Byron Baes did not reach? Uh… I’m going to say “none” because I don’t want Jade to read me the way he read Alex.

I think this entire article is evidence that I actually do have too much time. But, y’know, you can look at all the evidence above and draw your own conclusions about Jade’s social media following. Ultimately, though, does it matter now? Does it matter if the producers cast Jade because they thought his Insta was suspect and knew it would make for drama? Does it matter if Jade bought followers to increase his influencer cred and one day get a shot at reality TV fame? Maybe both scenarios are true, maybe they’re both false, maybe the truth pulls from a bit of both. What really matters is that Jade Kevin Foster makes for excellent television… and now he’s probably getting a lot of 100% genuine follows thanks to Netflix’s new reality show.

Stream Byron Baes on Netflix