Candidates came from Cheerful's creator index — 165,176 public Instagram profiles, categorised automatically. Selection was automated and is disclosed as such: pattern filters removed business, agency and repost accounts, a classifier judged each remaining profile against the vertical, and a second pass whose only instruction was to argue for exclusion re-examined every survivor. Nothing reaches this page that all three agreed to keep. A person reads the result and decides whether to publish it, but does not choose who appears — that is the honest description, and the automatic categorisation it corrects for is why the filters exist at all: left alone it puts brands, clinics, restaurants and aggregator accounts alongside individual creators.
The distribution figures come from that index. Every per-creator number — followers, engagement, median likes and comments, reels share, last posted — was measured directly on September 9, 2026 by reading each account and its 12 most recent posts. Nothing is estimated, and no figure is borrowed from a creator other than the one it sits beside.
Where a number cannot be measured we leave it out rather than fill it in. 3 of these 16 accounts hide their Instagram like counts, so their engagement rate shows a dash — the API reports a near-zero figure for them and publishing that would be wrong.
These are public profiles and we have no commercial relationship with the creators listed. If you are on this page and would rather not be, contact us and we will remove you — no reason required.
