“In calling it Close Friends, Instagram is making it creepier than it has to be,” she says. (An Instagram spokesperson says the company has no plans to add its own on-platform payment options.) At any rate, Wiley argues that the only weird thing about these arrangements should be the name Instagram chose for the feature. There’s a precedent for this: Erotic models have long offered “Premium Snapchat” subscriptions as a jerry-rigged but safer way to sell nude photography to a curated customer base. Former venture capitalist Jenny Gyllander, who now runs the product-review Instagram account as her full-time job, offers a $100 lifetime membership to her Close Friends list-300 people have signed up, and she’s now working her way down a waiting list. Podcasts and YouTube channels with loyal followings charge for extra, more intimate access to their hosts. (Like high school!) Others are artists and creative types funding specific projects, charging $1 a month for behind-the-scenes content on their cosplay or illustration accounts. Many of the Instagram users who have caught on to this financial hack are lifestyle influencers charging money for friendship at its most literal-broken down into its component parts, which are then sorted into various tiers of ascending value. “We support whatever can do to make money.” We would recommend it,” says Danielle Wiley, CEO of the San Francisco influencer agency Sway Group. She’s one of many who have figured out that the Instagram feature-originally intended as something like an image-based inner-circle group text-can also be used to make some extra money.
Those followers get access to exclusive “rants, theories, and personal updates,” including “silly details” of Abrao’s love life, big ideas about “existence and wellness,” and poetry and prose from her personal archives. She has close to 94,000 followers, about 400 of whom are her “Close Friends,” a privilege won by paying $3.33 a month on Patreon. Gabi Abrao, better known as on Instagram, is “developing a language with the invisible.” Her page is half memes, half photos of her- eating fresh fruit, or trying out a metal detector, or posing in a museum bathroom wearing an incredible maxi dress, or staring sleepily into the middle distance in a satin pollution mask-often accompanied by poetic text about the past, the present, and the universe.
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