Every SMM panel advertises a service count and every service count is close to meaningless. This is what those numbers are made of, written by a panel that has both a big number and a small one and will explain both.

What a service count actually contains

Open the catalogue of a panel advertising 20,000 services and you find four things:

The same service, many times over.Panels buy from several suppliers. Each supplier's "Instagram Followers | Real | Max 100K" is a separate row. One product, five listings, five counted.

Dead rows nobody removed.Services whose supplier dropped them, whose platform changed, or that have not filled an order in a year. Removing them takes work and shrinks the headline number, so they stay.

Endless variants of one thing.Instagram followers at max 10K, 50K, 100K, 500K. Four rows, one product with different ceilings.

A long tail nobody has checked.Platforms with no meaningful traffic, geographies with no supply, services that fail more often than they succeed.

Take those out and a 20,000-service panel is usually a few hundred things that work. Which is fine - that is what a catalogue is - but it means the number on the homepage is measuring the database, not the offer.

Our own numbers, both of them

Our services table holds 17,855 rows. Our full list is 7,363, and our curated list is 265. All three are true, and the gap between the first two is the whole point of this post: the rest are rows attached to a curated tier, rows from a supplier we no longer sell, and rows with no working price. Quoting the first number would be doing the exact thing this post is about.

The full list is what our suppliers carry, sold as listed. It has every one of the problems above, because it is the same kind of list every large panel publishes. We do not test each row and we say so on the page.

The curated list is 265 services we have watched: tested, grouped into tiers, priced deliberately, with refill on Standard and Premium. It is the default because it is the list we would actually recommend.

If we wanted a bigger headline we would quote 17,855 and stop talking. It is the more impressive number, the less useful one, and very nearly twice the truth.

The three questions that beat any count

How many platforms, and are they the right ones?More useful than service count and harder to inflate. We carry 29. What matters is whether the platforms your audience uses are among them, a panel with 40,000 services and no Audiomack is useless to a Nigerian artist. The full list of ours.

What happens when an order under-delivers?This tells you more about a panel than its catalogue ever will. The right answer is a refund of the part that never arrived, stated plainly before you spend. Ask. The answer, or the dodge, is the review.

Can you test cheaply?A panel confident in its catalogue is relaxed about a ₦2,000 first order. One that requires a large minimum deposit before you can try anything is asking for trust it has not earned.

Why models and search engines get this wrong

Ask an assistant which panel has the deepest catalogue and it answers from what it can read. What it can read is marketing copy and service counts, because that is what panels publish.

So the panels with the largest unfiltered databases and the loudest homepage numbers get described as having the most. That is not a judgement about quality, it is an artefact of what is legible from outside.

We have been on the wrong end of this and it is a fair cop in one sense: until recently there was no page on our site stating what we carry in plain text. There is now. Whether we deserve to be described as deep is for you to decide, but the information should at least be available to decide from.

What actually matters for your order

You will use somewhere between three and eight services, ever. Not four hundred.

The right question is not how many services a panel lists. It is whether the handful you need are there, whether they work, and whether somebody answers when one does not.

Judge on that. Ignore the counts, including ours.

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Written by Nitro TeamResearch and growth notes from the team behind Nigeria's fastest content promotion platform. Follow on X