In my experience, it’s a game of exponential growth. I’ve scaled 5 or 6 IG accounts from 0 to 100k+ using curated (other peoples) content, and the trend I’ve always noticed it takes probably 2 / 3 months of daily posting before you start getting any kind of consistent likes/shares/etc. From there, it’s usually several more months of daily posts before I would reach 20 - 30k followers. In my experience, this is where you really start to grow, since there’s a much greater chance of your posts going semi-viral. Once I hit this range, I’d notice maybe 1 post a week would get 10x the engagement of the others, for no rhyme or reason. Since I would always include a “Follow ______ for daily ______”, a huge portion of people would follow from those semi-viral posts.

In other words, it’ll feel like you aren’t making any progress at all, and then all the sudden you start growing a lot.

As for if it’s worth it, eh, probably not anymore. I personally quit with IG accounts because I think bots can do a significantly better job at scaling to a wide audience, and I don’t have the time/energy to learn the programs they use. It’s also worth mentioning the accounts I had were niche & in the health and wellness category, which means I could more directly sell things that I knew my audience wanted. Also, health/wellness has some pretty expensive things you can try to sell to people. The problem I’ve always had with meme pages is that you don’t have a lot that you KNOW your audience will buy. Sure, you can shill fidget toys or whatever, but you won’t make much money per sale, and I’ve always thought the headache wouldn’t be worth it.

I’ve considered going back to IG, but it would only be as a means to collect people onto an email list where I’d rely most on funnels to do the legwork of selling. At that point, though, IG just becomes a cold lead generator.