title: How can I quickly get the follower count for a large list of Instagram users?
body: <p>I have the following program in python that reads in a list of 1390680 URLS of Instagram accounts and gets the follower count for each user. It utilizes the instaloader. Here's the code:</p>
  <pre class="lang-py prettyprint-override"><code>import pandas as pd
  from instaloader import Instaloader, Profile
  # 1. Loading in the data
  # Reading the data from the csv
  data = pd.read_csv('IG_Audience.csv')
  # Getting the profile urls
  urls = data['Profile URL']
  
  def getFollowerCount(PROFILE):
      # using the instaloader module to get follower counts from this programmer
      # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52225334/webscraping-instagram-follower-count-beautifulsoup
      try:
          L = Instaloader()
          profile = Profile.from_username(L.context, PROFILE)
          print(PROFILE, 'has', profile.followers, 'followers')
          return(profile.followers)
      except Exception as exception :
          print(exception, False)
          return(0)
  
  # Follower count List
  followerCounts = []
  # This loop will fetch the follower count for each user
  for url in urls:
      # Getting the profile username from the URL by removing the instagram.com
      # portion and the backslash at the end of the url
      url_dirty = url.replace('https://www.instagram.com/', '')
      url_clean = url_dirty[:-1]
      followerCounts.append(getFollowerCount(url_clean))
  
  # Converting the list to a series, adding it to the dataframe, and writing it to
  # a csv
  data['Follower Count'] = pd.Series(followerCounts)
  data.to_csv('IG_Audience.csv')
  </code></pre>
  <p>The main issue I have with this is that it is taking a very long time to read through the entire list. It took 14 hours just to get the follower counts for 3035 users. Is there any way to speed up this process?</p>