Jade Kevin Foster is one of the stars of Byron Baes; a Netflix series that follow influencers as they live work and play in the idyllic town of Byron Bay. Ironically, most of the cast start out with a relatively small following on social media, and Foster was one of the only cast members whose follower numbers were in the six digits.
One of the major storylines of the show saw co-star and talent manager Alex Reid accuse Foster of buying his Instagram followers.
In episode three of the show, Reid confronted Foster at a party and told him that he’d run an authenticity check on the influencer’s Instagram account, and that 451,000 of the people following were from Turkey. Considering that Foster is Australian, Turkey seems to be a bizarre niche to have his majority of followers from.
Foster claims that he accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers after Kim Kardashian posted a selfie of the two together on her Instagram account. Prior to the famous cameo, Foster had around 11k followers and he now has over 1.2 million.
Now, a source uncovered by So Dramatic! suggests that Reid may be correct in accusing Foster of buying Instagram followers, likes and comments.
“On the show he claims his 1.2 million followers are all legit… but swear on my life he [said] to us all in person that he bought loads of them back in the day to get himself famous after meeting Kim Kardashian,” the unnamed source told the podcast.
A Hootsuite study has revealed a formula for the “unspoken industry standard” of how much an influencer receives for posting a sponsored post. It says that the figure can be worked out by the following using the following calculation: “$100 per 10,000 followers + extras for type of post (x # of posts) + additional factors = total rate.”
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When applying the above formula, it suggests that Foster should be making at least $12,000 per Instagram post.
Whether or not Foster is making bank thanks to his massive following isn’t public knowledge. However, the influencer did reveal that Netflix “were very generous” with the amount of money that stars of Byron Baes were paid for their time on the show.
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