Most Followed

For a while there, Ariana Grande had the most followers on Instagram. Selena held it before her, but that’s done now. 146 million people watching her stories, her selfies, whatever she posts—the number’s incomprehensibly large, but then again, everything about Instagram is incomprehensible when you actually stop and think about it.

The thing about Ariana isn’t the follower count though. It’s that she became famous the hard way, through things that broke her open publicly. Manchester happened and she didn’t disappear, which was maybe the realest thing any celebrity has done in a while. Then everything else happened—Pete, the engagement, Mac Miller dying, all of it immediate and public. Most famous people manage to keep those parts separate, sealed off. Ariana just didn’t.

That’s why people followed her, I think. Not because she was polished or seemed to have it figured out, but because she clearly didn’t. You could watch someone live through their twenties in real time, the good parts and the messy parts, all of it documented. Instagram quantified that interest into a number, and the number kept climbing because authenticity sells better than anything else, apparently.