I spend a lot of time automating work, and for a few months now I have been fascinated by the SMM Panel market, specifically: why does an Instagram Follower service cost $0.01 per 1,000 followers on one SMM Panel, and $4 on another?
So $0.01 per 1,000 followers on one site and $4 on another. 400x difference for the same service, delivered in the same way. Clearly I had to make something of this. I spent some time building up a comparison tool for SMM Panels, that currently tracks around 2,000 SMM Panels, in real time.
What’s actually going on in the SMM panel market
SMM panels are reseller platforms that resell social media services (followers, views, likes, comments etc) which are originally provided by a supplier. Most SMM panels in the market run on similar script-based backends, with a handful of common frameworks powering the majority of them. Due to the huge amount of panels in the market and also the huge amount of suppliers in the market, every panel is sourcing from different suppliers. Some panels might be targeting the same kind of customer as other panels do, but most of the panels are targeting a completely different kind of customer.
Additionally, the SMM panel market is quite aggressively self-promotional. Look for “The Best SMM Panels” or “Top 10 SMM Panels” and you can bet your house that the top spot will be ranked by one of the marketers from the panels themselves (in some cases, even the very same person writing the list and running their own SMM panel) and that their very own service will be ranked at the #1 position in the list. None of this content is ever independently verified to confirm the ‘best’ nature or pricing of the panels. All of this information will also probably be outdated by the time the articles have actually been published as the information is typically garnered by the article writer a month or two in advance to hit the optimal PR wire services release date for maximum pick-up and publication.
Why I built a comparison layer instead of trusting the lists
This is why I built the comparison layer for SMM panels. I could have just added SMM panels to my current list of “best services,” but then I would have just added to the already flooded market of self-promotional “rankings” that only serve to make money for the author.
SMMCompare is the result — it tracks live pricing across over 2,000 panels rather than relying on a static, sponsored snapshot.
From a development standpoint, it’s worth noting that the APIs for the vast majority of the panels follow a very similar structure. As a result, aggregation is possible. However, that doesn’t mean that every panel is equally reliable to pull pricing information from. Some have very reliable uptime and have well-documented APIs, others have APIs that fail silently from time to time, or return outdated pricing information. Others’ APIs may be down for days at a time without notice. None of this would be apparent from a list of “the best SMM panels” paid for by the SMM panels themselves to be promoted in articles that are published via a press release distribution service.
What the price data reveals
Looking through the pricing of over 2,000 SMM Panels I noticed a few interesting things:
Panels reprice frequently — often several times per week. As a result, a panel’s pricing for a given service will go up and down during the course of a month. A service with the lowest price today will very likely not have the lowest price a month from now.
New panels go online with below market price to get resellers to deposit money. After that, prices normalize. On SMMCompare’s panel pages, you can check a panel’s domain age and its trust history — a weak indicator of future performance, but still a useful one.
Price is only half the story when it comes to services — the refill policy is a much more important factor to take into account than the initial low price. Many services offer higher prices with good refill guarantees, meaning they end up working out cheaper than similar services with extremely low launch prices but awful refill rates (30-40% in a single month).
Reliability of the API of the SMM panels is extremely variable, even for the panels that claim to offer the same features. For serious resellers, automating orders is a huge part of their business. Therefore, they require the highest level of reliability, and are willing to pay for it. This aspect is just as important as the price per unit for them.
For developers thinking about building something similar
If you’re looking to build a solution in this space, it looks interesting. The aggregation problem is a lot harder than I initially anticipated, and while the APIs of SMM Panels are standardized enough to allow for basic price gathering, there’s enough variation in how services are packaged and how refills are handled to make building a useful tool that goes beyond price comparison quite a challenge. The challenge of building a tool that trusts an SMM Panel to grade itself (and others like it) is a significant one.
SMMCompare also shows the API endpoints of each panel as well as the structure of the services offered by each. This makes it very easy to test the API of a panel before adding it to your tool. It would be a pain to have to test the API of each panel manually one by one.
The takeaway
The interesting lesson here is that in any market filled with self-promotional “best of” lists published by the participants themselves, the only information of any value that can be obtained is that which is retrieved by the person seeking information himself or herself, by connecting to the market’s data streams. Static lists of rankings decay quickly. Live comparison of the salient factors of interest does not.
