Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 08/28/2012 at 3:01 PM News

The Popdust Files: lady gaga

28,847,607—the number of Lady Gaga Twitter followers at the time of this article’s writing—is a pretty big number, one that Gaga has worked tirelessly for with her continual outreach to even her most disenfranchised Little Monsters, shouting out her fanbase at every possible opportunity and always letting them know that they come first. Answering fan tweets, retweeting them constantly—Gaga is among the most engaged and engaging pop stars over the Bluebird, earning her gargantuan following with sheer hustle.

Yet even with all her efforts, it looks like you still don’t get to 28,847,607 without a little bit of help. Social media company Status People reports that a staggering 71% of Gaga’s followers—rough 20 million of them—are accounts that are either like inactive or belong to spam bots that don’t actually represent any human fan behind them. The research was done through a study of the singer’s 100,000 latest followers, of which only 29% were found to be “good” followers.

Of course, even if 20 million of those followers are un-good—and we doubt the number’s that high, since it seems pretty likely to us that more of Gaga’s new followers are spam these days, now that she’s been around for a while, then when she first arrived on the scene and generated huge amounts of legitimate human-fan interest—that still leaves 8 million good fans, which is, uh, more than we have here at Popdust. Hold your head up, Stefani.

[NME]