Instagram Rolls Out Plan For In-Feed Advertisments

New submitter cagraham writes "The currently ad-free Instagram has announced a plan to monetize its services by selling premium placement to brands. 35 year old Emily White is in charge of making Instagram profitable, according to the Wall Street Journal. The move shows the new priorities of parent-company Facebook, who now has to worry about appeasing shareholders, as well as fending off rivals such as Twitter. Whether Instagram's young and growing user base will balk at the ads, or even notice them, remains to be seen."

Comments

I think it is necessary

[xevioso]

It's necessary for the internet to grow and evolve. As soon as they start putting ads on Instagram, on devices that don't have much real estate to begin with, people will start flocking to new and upcoming apps or websites that do something similar, but slightly different, and with no ads. Then eventually a lagre company will buy said app, once the user base trends huge, and they will try to figure out how to monetize the new app. This is how the internet works.

Re:I think it is necessary

[DogDude]

No, the Internet used to be ad-free. People used to use the Internet to learn things, and to share information with other people. Until the unwashed massed got to it in the mid 90's, the Internet was wonderful: Email, Gopher, WWW, FTP, etc.

In fact, those bits of the Internet are still there, but they've been overwhelmed and vastly out-numbered by people more interested in money than being an intelligent, compassionate human being.

Re:I think it is necessary

[xenobyte]

So every time a web site or app starts showing ads, people stop using it? How is Google still in business? How is Slashdot still in business?

Ad-blockers? - They make the experience tolerable and allows the visitors to focus on the subject matter, not some noisy, bouncing, obscuring- or attention-grabbing ad for something nobody really needs.

Using good ad-blockers helps keep the Internet almost completely ad free, the way it should be.

Re:I think it is necessary

[cayenne8]

I tend to disagree on this one. I was there back in the day: the WWW was a lonely place filled with homepages that did not convey any useful information, Gopher was a commercial project (hence the reason why it failed), and the communities on Usenet were just as rude as most web fora nowadays.

Protocols were insecure and didn't scale well (local BBS'es and freenets were constantly occupied, Usenet lacked structure and moderation to facilitate large community discussions, etc.)

The internet has changed, and largely for the better. I don't miss the days when the Internet was an obscure little research network.

However, in the days before the internet was so commercialized, the govt largely stayed out of it and out of the way. We now have the govt passing laws trying to keep up the old ways and end up hindering progress, in order to protect commerce on the internet.

I think that the vast commercialization was what opened the door to the world govts trying to interfere and control the internet.

Also, the basic idea behind the internet, that any computer could hook onto the network and become a peer with all other computers is becoming largely lost in the great shuffle of 'progress'. I remember when my TOS for ISP was very simple (essentially don't do anything illegal), but there were no ports blocked, you could run servers (I cut my teeth a bit back in those days, trying to learn apache, postfix/sendmail,mixmaster, etc) on your home network and no one got pissed off that you were doing this.

But now, the providers and govt. continue to squeeze these freedoms and ideals the internet early on had in abundance, and are trying to limit and redefine what you connection is or should be.

I don't doubt that sadly, in the not far enough away future, that you will have to have some soft of govt issued ID just to connect, and likely you will have less and less control over your computer, and of course...more monitoring.

This will be all in the name of:

1. Think of the children

2. Security from the terrorists

3. The need to protect the online revenue generators.

We see this already today. Heck, the first two alone give them the "keys to the Constitution" here in the US, which opens the flood gates to even more anti-user freedom legislation.

Re:I think it is necessary

[jimbolauski]

No, the Internet used to be ad-free.

If you recall that was when the internet was subsidized an only available to very few. So instead of paying for the services that a few people can utilize with money the government confiscated from people it is now paid for by companies trying to sell a product and available to everyone.

People used to use the Internet to learn things, and to share information with other people. Until the unwashed massed got to it in the mid 90's, the Internet was wonderful: Email, Gopher, WWW, FTP, etc.

People still use the internet to learn things and share information, now they can also use it to make money. Further even before the "unclean masses" had the internet there were games and many other noneducational things happening on BBSs, I can remember going to my dad's work on the weekends and playing Bolo, a multiplayer tank strategy game, in the late 80's.

In fact, those bits of the Internet are still there, but they've been overwhelmed and vastly out-numbered by people more interested in money than being an intelligent, compassionate human being.

You must not be looking in the right spots there are vast collections of knowledge still out there, the amount of crap has gone up but so has the amount of knowledge available, college courses, instructional videos on how repair and make almost anything, published research papers. It's ashame you think only the elite few should be allowed on the internet thus significantly limiting the amount of people that can reach that knowledge so it can stay "pure". Having a tool where just about everyone is able to reach this vast well of knowledge is well worth the make you penis larger spam, and all the other crap out there.

Re:I think it is necessary

[OakDragon]

Ignore is strength.

There is something profound here, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Whoops....

[Lordfly]

My finger slipped. Instead of clicking on the "premium ad experience" I accidentally uninstalled Instagram from my phone.

Damn those fat fingers.

xkcd - Instagram

[tokiko]

http://xkcd.com/1150/

Re:xkcd - Instagram

[Mr. Slippery]

So in your model how does a site like YouTube work?

Why should a site like YouTube be needed? If everyone had to host their own video content, perhaps we'd have come to useful video standards long ago? Certainly having the majority of on-line content in one place is useful for the copyright cartel, but what does it do for the rest of us?

The other alternative would be to have ads, but not have them fill up every available space. If ads were rare and tasteful, say a single simpIe text link on each page, I wouldn't need Adblock Plus. Heck, if in addition to that they didn't track people, I might even click on one once in a while.

Instead they're so common and obnoxious that the web is useless without ad blockers. And in 20 years of using the web (holy shit -- yes, I wrote my first HTML in 1993), I can count on my fingers the number of ads I've clicked.

Re:Can anything be immune from ads?

[CohibaVancouver]

Why must everything be constantly monetized?

I would love to see a social gathering site whereby people pay a small annual fee

...or, to put it another way, people 'monetize it.'

Insta-what?

[PNutts]

In my day we passed along life experiences with stories and interpretive dance. Kids these days.

Who?

[Sir Holo]

What's an Instagram?

Is that like a Polaroid, only 15 years after losing relevance?