You've Never Seen Push Notifications Like This

While most of us merely dream about what it might be like to one day ascend to the plane of Instagram-celebrity, for a select few, it's simply an everyday thing. Now, in a video posted by Demy de Zeeuw, we can finally see what it's like to get push notifications when you have millions of Instagram followers. The 38-second clip originally posted to De Zeeuw's Facebook page shows us how something that might be incredibly exciting at first, can seem almost a bother — clogging the smartphone with a stream of notifications, rendering it useless, until the push notifications are turned off again. This video gives us a surreptitious peek into the secret world of Insta-fame. Demy de Zeeuw is a Dutch footballer who has played for the Dutch national team 27 times though he is currently a free-agent; he runs the popular soccer-focussed Instagram forum 433, which has over eight million followers. His personal Instagram account boasts over 83,000 followers.

De Zeeuw turned on the push notifications just before posting to Instagram, and the results were staggering. A push notification shows when your post has been retweeted, liked, commented on, and so forth. For the regular user, getting one or two gives you a little positive thrill during a dull day. For De Zeeuw, whose posts usually get around 200,000 to 300,000 likes, and hundreds if not thousands of comments, looking at all the notifications could certainly make his head explode. The video of the notifications itself, has ironically garnered 15 million views, and growing.

Check it out for yourself here:

So what does it mean to live the life of the rich and Insta-famous? You know, besides having a phone constantly clogged with comments from your adoring followers? Since Instagram is a democratic public platform that allows users to reach a wide viewerbase with their message or photo, obviously it's great for self-promotion — and it can also be quite lucrative.

Having an account with over 10 thousand followers opens up the possibility of sponsorship and product promotion. Celebrities often partner with brands who will pay quite a lot per post in order to reach the Instagram market which is generally skewed younger. Some users with successful accounts are sent free products with the hopes that they will be featured. According to Harper’s Bazaar, companies may spend over $1 billion per year on sponsored Insta posts.

Danielle Bernstein, a model and personal fashion blogger, earns between $5,000 to $15,000 for single piece of sponsored content (which is definitely the dream for any 22 year old). However, these prices are from before she hit one million followers. The cost of a single sponsored post is expected to increase as her followers grow. And, some users even charge the companies for the number of "likes" in addition to the photo fee. There's no telling what an account with millions upon millions might be able to earn.

Thinking of how these push notifications translate into cold hard cash makes them seem like less of a pain, now, doesn't it?

Images: Demy De Zeeuw/Facebook