It happens to everybody on Instagram. You follow some cute animal account and strap in for some 100 Per cent Adorable Doggo Content™, but pretty soon the animal is trying to sell you everything from t-shirts to toothbrushes. Sponsorships make the Instagram world go round. So it’s reasonable to ask: When is this stupid Instagram-famous egg going to sell me some shit?
If you haven’t heard the hottest news of the day, this simple egg just broke the record for the most-liked post on Instagram. With 29.8 million likes and counting, it blew past the old record holder, Kylie Jenner’s baby, which has 18.3 million likes.
The egg account has raised so much attention because it was started with the explicit purpose of simply getting more likes than the Kylie Jenner post. That’s it. There’s nothing else special about the egg as far as we know.
“Let’s set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram. Beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner (18 million)! We got this,” the account stated when it was started on January 4, 2019.
And while the egg is obviously some kind of statement on the banal nature of celebrity and social media, I can’t help wondering what comes next.
It’s unclear who’s behind the egg account, but they have a lot of eyeballs fixated on them right now. And that kind of engagement online is worth real money if you’re willing to sell some ad space on your profile.
Kylie Jenner didn’t let the potential for engagement pass her by. She posted an egg-breaking video yesterday with the caption, “Take that little egg.” An ouroboros of engagement, if you will.
The person (or bot) who runs world_record_egg did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment. But we’ll update this article if we hear back. In the meantime, I’m left wondering what the most likely ad will be for the egg account. Something related to food would be incredibly on-brand, but perhaps too obvious for whoever’s behind this commentary.
The absolute worst case scenario? The banal egg account was started by Kylie Jenner to create artificial competition and raise more awareness of Kylie Jenner.
Actually, strike that. The absolute worst case scenario is that the egg has time travel abilities and went back in time and didn’t bother to kill Hitler and also the egg is sexist and doesn’t recycle and reclines its seat on the aeroplane despite the fact that there’s no fucking legroom anymore, arsehole. But that Kylie Jenner scenario is a close second.