Would you have thought that today you can even buy Facebook friends? Up to now I only knew such practices from school. You give away your lunch, do someone else's homework or let them copy your own. All just to motivate the other person to consider you a friend. In today's digital age, where Facebook and Instagram have made real friends completely obsolete, there seem to be other ways to do this.

You can no longer tell how popular someone is by who they hang out with during breaks or who sits next to them at lunch. You can tell by the number of friends, fans and followers in the social media. This is of course much more practical, because these numbers are much clearer and more unambiguous. It's also more honest, because at school you never knew who your real friends were, and who just pretended to be friends because they were hoping for an advantage. Today it's different, because the friend display on Facebook does not lie!

Or does it?

Virtual contacts and friends

That not everyone with whom you are friends on Facebook is a real friend should be clear to everyone by now. Everybody wants to look as good as possible and so we usually confirm every request as a general rule. The main thing is that it doesn't look like you are a ModF - a person without digital friends.

Since Instagram has been added, things look a bit different, of course. Here you don't need friends anymore, but followers. You could also call it Stalker but the official translation is Fans. The more people follow you, the more it says about the quality of your pictures and your own popularity. At least in theory, because if you spend some time with this topic you'll soon realize that the quality of the pictures doesn't matter. There are much more different tricks, techniques and rules that one has to master in order to get a follower snake.

The profession of the influencer

What began as a nice gimmick and attention-grabbing game has long since turned into a tough business. Whereas Facebook used to be there to keep up to date with where Betti had just gone on vacation and what Olav had for lunch today, today you can hardly find a post that doesn't have the word "sponsored" in it. In other words: Facebook has become a web platform that is much less about contacting friends or fictitious friends and much more about promoting products, brands and opinions. Instagram is even more blatant in this respect. At the latest since the term "influencer" was coined and made into a generally known job title, it has become clear that social media not only serve to destroy our social life, but that they have also revolutionized the entire market economy. In the past, you could be sure that a product became known and famous if you put it in the commercial breaks on RTL and co at prime time often enough. Today, on the other hand, it seems that television advertising is only something for old people who cannot handle a mobile phone.

Advertising in the classical sense is being replaced

Advertising now takes place in a framework that is more specific, indoctrinating and confusing than ever before. It is no longer a matter of filming a commercial where everyone can see that it is advertising. It is much more about placing your products in a way that everyone sees them and perceives them as positive, without realizing that you are being wooed. This is where the influencers come into play. The more followers they have, the greater their social influence and therefore the more valuable they are as advertising ambassadors. The companies have also recognized this and so it came about that as a successful influencer you can earn a lot of money today through advertising contracts. If you specialize in the right target group and have a follower circle in the five to seven-digit range, you can earn several thousand euros with a single photo.

But why am I telling you all this?

Get rich with Instagram and Co.

Until yesterday, this was also for us only relatively interesting information about a new trend in the media, which somehow influences and somehow not. Today, however, we were invited for lunch to a group of young youth workers who organized a summer program of the church for the children of the city. One of them was studying advertising design and was a real crack at social media. We thought we knew a lot about the subject until now, but what he told us outshone everything else.

Would you have thought that today you can actually buy friends and followers? And by that I don't mean the old school bread or homework variety, but actual buying. You pay an amount of money to a somewhat dubious middle-sized company based in a country whose name you usually can't pronounce and you don't get anything in return. Then, in the next few days, and when the system is running well and you have bought high quality "friends", even for weeks and months, this fateful number increases after us, which shows you your own digital popularity coefficient. We didn't even want to believe it at first, so our conversation partner showed us a sample page where we really could have bought friends, likes and followers. If you also need a proof, you can have a look at "Poprey". This is such a sample page.

Everything is for sale

But that is not all. In the field of social media you can actually buy just about anything you can imagine. From subscribers, likes and views on YouTube to friends, fans and likes on Facebook to followers and likes on Instagram.

The cost of this kind of friendship management varies greatly, depending on your needs. The most expensive and best are friends, likes and fans, who are from real people in Germany and are slowly building up. Because these are most likely to give the impression that they are real advocates.

Cheaper and easier to get, on the other hand, are those who have their address in India, Africa or other areas of the world, where it is difficult to determine from here whether these people actually exist or not. Both is possible. Some friend sellers apparently work with real people who are hired for a pittance to do nothing else but link posts, pages or photos all day long. Our explainer from the other end of the table aptly described them as "click slaves".

The risks of buying friends

Other providers, on the other hand, completely dispense with real people and develop so-called bots. They then use these to generate accounts that automatically distribute their friend requests and Likes. The only problem is that these fake accounts can be relatively easily exposed by YouTube, Facebook and Instagram and therefore carry a certain risk. Because if the social network operator notices that you are cheating, it is easy for your account to be blocked. In this case you have spent money and not only have you gained nothing, but you have lost everything you have built up legally.

It can also happen to you with the friends you have bought that not you, but they are exposed over time and then deleted. As a result, the number of friends or followers may then decrease as quickly as it has increased before.

When the youth worker told us about the story, only question marks appeared in my head at first. Why should someone spend money to have more followers, likes or friends? Especially if they weren't real at all and couldn't even give you credit if you wanted them. They were a bit like the digital version of imaginary friends, only that you at least had a personal connection to them. But then I realized that it was no longer just about the friends themselves, but about various third parties who now thought I was famous and popular. The young man gave us the following to consider.

Why are friends and Likes so important that you pay money for them?

If you are a public figure, today you are expected to have a well-functioning account on almost every social network. You can no longer be an actor or politician who gets millions of viewers on TV but has only three friends on Facebook. But neither can every halfway famous person afford to hire a commissioner or even an entire department to maintain their online profiles. And yes, that's what exists and it's done a lot.

But it is not possible for everyone. And even if it does, it does not mean that the account will really flourish as a result. Sometimes you just have to help, even if it's just a little help at the beginning. Because in our society there is a strange phenomenon, which can be called a "follower mentality". We don't follow or link anything just because we like it. We specifically pick out the things that are already popular. So the more friends or likes someone has, the more he will get in the future.

Is boyfriend buying a scam?

Now, if you think about how much money you can make with Instagram through advertising contracts if you have enough friends, then inventing or buying such virtual fans is bordering on the fraudulent. Legally, you are probably in a grey area. It depends on who you are and how you use the fans. As a private person, there is no legal reason why you shouldn't boost your profile a little bit by such a purchase. If you earn money with it or if you stand with and around your profile in public life, things look a bit different. In any case, you should inform yourself in advance where you stand legally.

The slogan of the day: Nowadays you can really buy everything!

Stages of the day: 1st stage: 18 km, 40 m altitude difference, finish: home for people with special care needs, Trani, Italy 2nd stage: 11 km, 30 m altitude gain, finish: Former Capuchin monastery, Bisceglie, Italy 3rd stage: 12 km, 20 metres altitude gain, finish: Basilica della Madonna dei Martiri, Molfetta, Italy