This is nothing in the grand scheme of social media account selling/trading. Go to any social media account marketplace and look through, you can buy any of the thousands of accounts that are for sale. People will spend literally thousands of dollars on accounts that have "original" handles, think dictionary defined one word handles. Then you have people who will spend money on accounts that have thousands of fake followers, because of how easy it is to game these platforms for views and followers. In my eyes it really ruins the fun of cool handles, because people are literally making livings off of scoping up as many of these accounts as they can and reselling them.

Want to get karma on reddit? Go to one of the endless amount of subs dedicated to karma farming and make clickbait posts. Turn around and sell the account to any of the political trolls that love to harvest those accounts.

Want to get followers on twitter/facebook/instagram/xbox/psn? Set your profile picture to that of any model you can find, claim it's you, then post nothing but clickbait and fake giveaway promotions. Turn around and sell it to the low self esteem teenagers who crave internet attention because they can't get it irl.

Granted you don't see much youtube account selling, I'd say mostly because since the platform is so old, a majority of the original account handle owners are long gone from the platform. You do still see it in some aspect though, especially on Fortnite channels. A bunch of seemingly original account names come out of nowhere and get a few hundred k subs in a short spam by posting clickbait fortnite vids? Not a coincidence. Most of those accounts are bought.

Then you have people who lurk through platforms and try an harvest as many original accounts as they can. I'm not sure how they do it, maybe just guessing?

The people who sell these accounts know how desperate some people are for them, that's why so much effort goes in to collecting these accounts. Just look at what happened with the xbox gamertag refresh, that was a disaster. What was meant to be an opportunity for anyone to get a cool gt,turned into bots harvesting thousands of accounts within seconds of them being released, then sold off.

A driving factor behind this behavior is that their is no effort to stop this. Instagram I believe tried to crack down, but what can you do really? You can't be suspicious of various IPs logging in, that's normal behavior even when it's truly malicious. The only way I can think to catch the selling of accounts would be to have an AI look at the behavior and flag drastic changes. Have an account that's normally on a west coast USA IP that posts cute cat photos that suddenly has a Europe location IP and it flooding its feed with clickbait? Probably a new owner.

In reality though, the amount of people who care about this is very minimal. It's a small niche of that consists of mostly teenagers/young adults who grew up in the digital/video game centric age. The need to impress others by having a cool online identity is paramount here.

EDIT: To give examples, I should include some prices. Want a 1 letter instagram account? It'll run you between $10,000-$50,000 if you can find someone selling. Want a 2 letter twitter handle? it'll cost you a few hundred/thousand depending on the letters. Want a two letter xbox gt? it'll cost you a few thousand. Want an original gmail account? It'll cost a few thousand. 3 letter accounts of most of the social media platforms range from a few hundred to a few thousand depending on if it's actually a word, looks cool, or if it's just a random assortment of characters and letters.