What Do Fan Page Creators Think About the 24 Hour Stan Cycle?

Fan pages can no longer be dismissed as legitimate news sources and cultural custodians, whether we like it or not. Much like the 24-hour news cycle pioneered by CNN in the 1980s, a new media pacing keeps creeping in, with general vibes of a 24-hour stan cycle. As though the cycle itself, like a stan, is the one seeking us out now, or rather setting us up to be ambushed. It can be news, spoilers, DMs, forecasts, hot takes, or emails… we can be certain that it will find us — well, unwell, or else. (Liam Neeson in Taken tea.)

The ambush is every feed that consumes us: inside browsers, under search bars, on new tabs, next to emails, on lock screens, pop-up notifications, or suggested prompts. And then there are the social media feeds, of course, dominated by fan pages we love and fan pages we hate, ranging from small profiles for niche communities to bigger accounts predicting election results of entire countries.

Pop Crave, Pop Base, and other variants are flooding every feed and stanning every "stun," independent of credentials, criteria, credibility, or even clear compensation. Some differ in voice, politics, or cadence, but they're still breaking news, premiering content, spilling tea, updating industries, dictating fashion, suggesting interests, telling jokes, and chronicling history for millions of people on an everyday basis.

For doomscrollers, it's a dangerously steep staircase of doom. For escapists, it's a beautifully smooth staircase toward escape. To understand how these staircases are being built (and where they're leading us), this writer spoke to the administrators, a.k.a. admins, behind three fan pages deemed successful for varying reasons — one of which resulted in the publishing of the most interesting book I've read in years.

Good luck trying to find a fiercer Pop Crave-esque fan page than Drag Crave, which covers all things RuPaul's Drag Race, spotlights local performers, and recognizes the creative collaborators that make the fantasy come to life. Since launching in March 2024, the X page reached 50,000 followers and established itself as a prominent hub for Drag Race updates — as evidenced by the drag entertainers, queer artists, PR teams, and entertainment reporters that engage with the profile.

"All of the money I receive is via direct monetization from Twitter [X] itself," Drag Crave tells PAPER, noting that the account only started monetizing in October 2025. The profits, so far, feel more like "gas money and pocket cash" than a "quit my day job" lump-sum payment.

The three most viral posts in Drag Crave herstory "coincidentally follow the theme of 'beloved Drag Race queen comes out as transgender,'" the admin remarks. Those are the coming-out posts from Detox in 2024 (2.3 million views), Valentina in 2025 (1.4 million views), and Marina Summers in 2026 (1.6 million views). Summers's coming-out was accompanied by a gorgeous photo shoot involving a team of collaborators who were all credited by Drag Crave in a subsequent X post — a practice that's still rare among fan pages.

When asked, the admin acknowledges the inherent pressures of keeping the page as updated as possible despite "only being one person" doing it all.

"I constantly stress over missing a huge news announcement while I'm asleep, or in class, or anywhere where I'm not in close proximity to my phone," Drag Crave says, causing a "quite unhealthy relationship between myself and my neurotic Instagram scrolling in search of a news announcement I may have missed."

But the admin recalls running the fan page "completely for free for over a year and a half" with a sense of pride.

"A year and a half of daily posts for no financial gain," they emphasize. "I'm grateful for [the profits], but it's not a make-or-break feature on whether I'll continue to run my page or not. As long as I still feel love from the community, I'm not going anywhere."

Decades before oomfs were horny on main, online thirst was quenched by bitmap files under 300 pixels that took 20 minutes to download. Rendering one JPEG back then could crash the connection of an entire household… and many risked it all, still. Even in 2026, users are OK dodging ads, closing pop-ups, and watching 480p videos on giant high-resolution screens.

Before interviewing the admin behind POPin4K (a spinoff of MENin4K that now anchors both accounts), I picture myself time-traveling and trying to explain the original account to someone back in the dial-up days. So, you can almost immediately rewatch that one hot scene with that one hot actor from that one hot TV show in 4K quality, loading right away on your X feed, just by following this fan page.

"Everything I post is my own edit," the admin of POPin4K (21 million followers) and MENin4K (102 million followers) tells PAPER. "99% of accounts just post the same pics or vids while tweeting about a show, or movie, or an event. I make my own edits directly from the HD source, which I think ppl like."

The fan pages are also good at spotting stars still in their niche-interest era. Namely, the POPin4K profile picture is of a Spanish actor who was in one season of Élite and in the never-renewed Olympo. "They might not be A-list, but these are well known celebs and ppl love their updates," POPin4K rightly argues.

Viral moments include a video of actor James Norton reacting to a POPin4K post about the wigs featured on HBO's House of the Dragon. Last year, John Summit celebrated that he "made it on gay twitter" by quote-sharing a post from MENin4K with 7 million views. Besides, there are almost 19 million views on an Euphoria clip, not to mention the 11 million views on a video of an unidentified DJ who probably "gets away with everything."

The fan pages "have done paid promotions for shows, but I don't do paid ads for products or sites. I don't think that goes with the vibe of my page." Otherwise, both pages are monetized, but "the money I get from it is not huge but good enough for a silly fan page," the admin says.

"I did transition from @MENin4K to @POPin4K and it was worth it. I can post so much more now," they explain. "I plan to run this page for as long as I'm having fun with it. If the space ever becomes too toxic or too much work, I might slow down with my postings."

The viral success of @kardashian_kolloquium on Instagram and eventual recognition as "TikTok's resident Kardashian scholar," per The New York Times, were bookends of MJ Corey's journey back into writing what this reporter considers one of the most fascinating books he's read in years. A bold, thick book that frames the Kardashian-Jenner family saga as a vehicle driving through the history and evolution of media.

It wasn't until 2018, while shifting focus from creative nonfiction writing to studying psychology at Columbia University, that Corey had her first proper exposure to Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Just for fun, she hopped onto a meme trend that would pair up KUWTK scenes with philosophical quotes. Eventually, the memes started to apply lessons that she was studying in real time.

"Once it became a little bit more educational, the audience grew," Corey tells PAPER, leading to viral moments and a friend's suggestion that perhaps these media analyses could turn into a book. "I had been kind of wondering, like, maybe," Corey recalls. "And then my friend convinced me, and the rest is history."

Tracking the business moves and media tactics from the Kardashian-Jenners led Corey to write and publish 2026's Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto, which brilliantly juxtaposes the evolution of media through a KUWTK lens. From the Hollywood studio system to Marilyn Monroe's dynamics with fame, the book narrates media history and shows its reflection on the Kardashian-Jenner lore — placing us in a Calabasas-sized cave of wonders (and media fluency) echoing concepts pioneered by Jean Baudrillard.

"There wasn't a vision of, This will become a book. It wasn't the goal of the account in the beginning," Corey says. "Once I realized it could be a book, I did something that I would advise writers to do — which is to pull together a query and send it around. Initially, just test it with agents that seem like they might be interested, but maybe aren't your dream agents."

She recalls, "I sent queries to a list of agents and didn't hear back from anyone, but one agent passed it along to another agent she felt was relevant for the pitch. So an agent did reach out to me from that initial round of queries that I'd sent out. And she's still my agent now, to this day. She's like the baddest bitch I know, really."

While working on the book proposal, Corey "freelanced for some places and also maintained my private practice with patients." The book was sold in a year. Having so many years of work already sorted on social media, Corey muses how convinced she felt that, Surely, the book is half-written, having done so much research for years now.

"But when I sat down to write the book, what I found was, 'Hm, OK. This is a lot,'" Corey admits. Formatting the book as a voyage "into Kardashian lore, but also the history of American media, while explaining these philosophies and their histories" was not the half-written book she had imagined.

"It was a pretty challenging triangle to take on for your first book," Corey says. The book's formal structure, for instance, took her a month to figure out. And even then, writing "was still a rigorous process of six to 12-hour days, every day, without really a break for a year and a half."

Corey reminisced on how little she saw her friends. But "I had to get it done," she also recalls. "I didn't want to lose a year and a half of momentum."

As the one-year deadline to write the book was met, Corey negotiated a few more months of extension. "I finished it the day that Trump's ear got shot. I'll never forget it," she remarks. "I wrote the last period of the sentence and I was like, I think I'm done. Then I went to celebrate, in a park with a friend, and the news came in about that. I'll never forget the day I finished it."

From the proliferation of fan pages, its clear the average person today no longer seeks out the news, necessarily, like browsing a website, opening a newspaper, or turning on the TV, to know what's going on.

This behavior even has a name, "incidental news exposure," which is defined as making "contact with the news…that is not initiated by users but instead occurs incidentally as a by-product of other activities." The perfect post is always one scroll away, algorithmically positioned to make readers feel sad, happy, detached, or absorbed, for the sake of longer screen times and higher engagement rates.

That mind-blowing speed and eye-popping branding of fan pages is slowly venturing into politics, too. Many remember when Pop Crave predicted Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election before "many of the country's major newspapers, wire services, or television networks," Vox reported — prompting Hunter Harris to tease that "Steve Kornacki works hard, but Pop Crave works harder" on Vulture. And then Pop Crave did it again in 2024, posting well before major news outlets that "Trump was unharmed" following the assassination attempt, Fast Company reported. The same day that Corey realized that her work on Dekonstructing the Kardashians was done, if readers recall.

I ask Corey if she thinks the next Kardashian-Jenner phenomenon — still dismissed but potentially unstoppable — is already among us. "To be clear, I don't mean this as, People are dismissing it, but they're doing good work. No," Corey says before sharing her forecast. "I think the next Kardashian is Clavicular."

We both chuckle, reactively. "People are gonna hate me for this, but what he's doing is interesting," Corey adds, again clarifying that she means of interest, not I'm interested. "My partner's been pushing me to start posting about it, but she's actually keeping up with him more than I can bear to."

Generally, though, Corey sees "the tech billionaires and Clavicular" as the logical next step, noting they've "taken on that [Kardashian] blueprint into streaming; these fake little scenarios that get disseminated on different algorithms, in little ways, with mini narratives."

Indeed, as legacy media chills (and, in some cases, freezes), fan pages multiply into hundreds of dedicated 24-hour stan cycles: full timelines and entire profiles focused on a singular celebrity, project, topic, interest, genre, or niche. So go ahead and join the hundreds of thousands of followers keeping up with the Pope and the Vatican on @ClubConcrave, with Brazilian pop star Anitta on @AnittaCrave, with situational comedy as a genre on @SitComCrave, with drag star Suzie Toot on @TootCrave, or who stumble upon the parody account @Poo_Crave and genuinely mistake it for a real news source that's reporting actual facts — thinking that it was Pop Crave.