How Many Followers Did Gabby Petito Have on Social Media When She Was Murdered?

The world was gripped with horror and heartbreak when "vanfluencer" content creator Gabby Petito went missing in 2021 before she was later found murdered, with authorities placing the blame on her fiancé, Brian Laundrie.

Brian himself was missing as people searched desperately for Gabby. His body was later discovered in a Florida swamp. His cause of death was suicide, and he left behind a note in which he took credit for Gabby's murder.

It was a shocking tableau that played out in front of the world as people's hopes rose, frayed, and then were dashed by the double-whammy of Gabby's murder and Brian's suicide.

As an influencer, people followed Gabby's social media accounts. But how many followers did she have before she was murdered? Here's what we know about her social media following.

The desperate search for Gabby played out on social media, as people shared a video of the two coming into contact with law enforcement around the time Gabby's loved ones reportedly lost contact with the 22-year-old.

In the video, police were responding to a domestic disturbance which turned out to be Gabby and Brian. An emotional Gabby was deemed the aggressor, and police did not appear to take the situation seriously.

So people flocked to her social media, pouring through pictures, videos, and comments for clues they hoped might lead to the young content creator before the clock ran out. Tragically, the clock was already run out by the time the public knew she was missing in mid-August, 2021.

Brian murdered her and dumped her body at Spread Creek Dispersed Camping Area, near Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park, where her body was later found on Sept. 19, 2021, three weeks after she was last seen alive.

In 2025, her Instagram account shows 1 million followers, and her YouTube account, Nomadic Statik, shows 186K followers. The only video she ever posted on YouTube shows 7.7 million views.

It's reasonable to assume many of those views occurred around or after when she was murdered due to media coverage, and many of her followers also likely came out of morbid curiosity or hope.

It's not clear how many followers she had when she died, but the number was likely south of 1 million on Instagram and perhaps fewer than 100,000 on Instagram, climbing rapidly as the headlines marched onwards to Gabby's untimely death.

By 2025, she has been gone four years. Four years during which people have questioned, grieved, and sought peace. Especially her loved ones, including her mother and stepfather Nicole and Jim Schmidt, and her father and stepmother Joe and Tara Petito.

They appeared in Netflix documentary American Murder: Gabby Petito, hoping to tell their daughter's story and offer a more human glimpse into the desperate search and then devastation left in the wake of her murder.

Michael Gasparro, director of American Murder, told Today, “The family wanted to be able to tell a story through Gabby’s eyes. They were like, ‘Listen, we have a lot of material that people haven’t seen … and we want Gabby’s legacy to be out there'. So we said we’d love to do it, we’d love to tell that story.”

On top of grief of the loss of their daughter, the Schmidts and Petitos have been busy. They launched a foundation in honor of Gabby, calling it the Gabby Petito Foundation.

The organization provides support for domestic violence and victims services organizations such as the Black and Missing Foundation and SafeSpace, a Florida non-profit.

The foundation has partnered with others to highlight missing persons and raise awareness of domestic violence and resources for victims.

Although nothing they do can bring Gabby back, they hope to help others avoid her tragic fate by helping domestic violence victims get out before the worst occurs. Because sometimes when you're stuck in the thick of it, it can seem like there's no way out and no hope.

The Gabby Petito Foundation wants people to know that there's always hope and a way out, and victims are not alone.