Instagram Ads Now Include Mobile Banners (adweek.com)

More ads are coming to Instagram. The Facebook-owned photo and video sharing network has begun rolling out a feature that links ads to profile pages. When someone clicks on a profile, for instance, they will see a banner at the bottom, reports AdWeek. The banner prompts the user to either visit a website or download an app. From the report: According to an Instagram rep, so-called "profile taps" will be included in click reporting for advertisers and are rolling out internationally. In a statement, Instagram said, "We found that Instagrammers were routinely tapping on a company's name from a direct response ad to learn more. Now when that happens, the call-to-action button from that same ad extends to the company's profile page to make it easier for people to discover a business they care about."

Comments

Yay! More advertising!

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Yay! More advertising, lucky us! Yippee, whoo hoo, lets all celebrate!

Advertising doesn't work

[sinij]

Dirty little secret that can break all these social media companies is that advertising doesn't work on their platforms. Not even 0.02% work that is traditionally cited for search. At this point people are so trained to ignore these, that you might as well not bother. So more of the same would only get ignored more.

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[Frederic54]

True, having been "on the net" since early 90s, I ignore ads completely, my brain does not see them. If there is a huge popup blocking everything I might disable it if I really want to read the article, else I just close the window, same for article divided into 10 pages.

The only ads I clicked in 25 years was a few times on /. to support them.

And I do not have Instagram ;-)

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[fustakrakich]

0.02% out of how many millions? I'll play those odds

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[sinij]

0.02% out of how many millions? I'll play those odds

This is pretty much the underlying assumption of all marketing, thing is - there is no research backing up any of these. There are some number for in-line topic-relevant search results, but there is no numbers for social media and in-app banners. It could be 2*10^-18 for all we know and you can't make these odds work.

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that the the traditional web/app advertising model in which you slap some ads on your site/app and are paid for eyeballs is obsolete, at least in it's current form.

Like you said, people already mentally filter out advertisements, but now, with ad blockers becoming more prevalent and dead easy to use, they can literally filter out advertisements. And this isn't just limited to technical users any more: even people that don't know much about computers are doing it now.

This trend won't go away. Advertisers pushed too hard with pop-ups, pop-unders, blinking ads, sound ads, video ads, tracking, etc, etc, and then, the last straw: ads that serve malware. So now, naturally, people want to block ads, and nobody - other than people with time and no life - is going finely craft their block rules to only let some "ethical" ads through. They will just use the default, which tends to be aggressive.

What does this mean for sites and ads that depend on ads? Well, they're screwed. There's no way around it. But that's the nature of business. You aren't entitled to be profitable, you are only entitled to try to be. Figure something else that works, stop complaining and I hope you become very rich (and that's not sarcasm).

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[fustakrakich]

Yeah, it's a gamble, but considering how little effort it takes and the low cost, why not try to make some mad money on the side? I will grant that the market is saturated right now. Just gotta come up with a new gimmick to reel in the suckers...

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[tripleevenfall]

I'm convinced that most or all of the clicks that popups claim are accidental, when people are trying to hit the close button.

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

"Banner blindness" is a thing.

Advertising is only demonstrated to work by subtley enhancing awareness, e.g. by placing a logo all over the place so that users unconciously internalize the legitimacy of the brand. While I hate all unsolicited marketing, this method at least has the benefit of not being a constant annoyance.

The larger problem is that "advertising" is a product sold to businesses who don't know better and are easily suckered out of their money by the likes of FB. You may as well pay for a listing in that dead-tree phone book that rots in the bushes next to my porch every year.

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[sinij]

Yeah, it's a gamble

At this point you are into lottery-jackpot odds.

Just gotta come up with a new gimmick to reel in the suckers..

This is how you got to these shitty odds in the first place. People willing to punch only so many monkeys before you are mentally or technologically ignored.

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[sinij]

Anecdote. For my b2b service advertising using Google AdWords when I restricted to non-mobile devices I cut my clicks by 100 times but improved interaction stats by nearly as much. That is, my theory that mobile was nearly all accidental clicks was empirically proven to be true. This is search-only on keywords, I could only imagine kinds of junk you'd get in other circumstances.

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[fustakrakich]

Well, it's not me personally, but somebody out there is deciding it's worth it, even if it's just a way washing money that can be written off. If the business was such a miserable failure, you wouldn't see so much of it.

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[Stan92057]

what % actually bough a product and service and would any other number really mean anything knowing most are accidentally clicks?

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

YEP! The 'success' that companies get from advertising is just circular. The website, the product company, the ad-server, and the ad-departments/marketing guys are the only ones who care- and they are just paying each other to 'do something'. It's a closed system, I mean are folks REALLY dying to click on an ad? (or is it an accident).

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but you don't get the money. Are you in the world of advertising/marketing? It's just a circular round of exchange between websites, ad servers, and marketing/financial projections. The money is not made from successful clicking- it's the other way around. When people buy stuff ANYWAYS, money is sent back to advertising. Purchases inspire ads, not the other way around.

Re:Advertising doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly you need to try some great erection supplimpmetns!

Will never see the ads...

[krelvin]

You get what you pay for... I don't use Instagram. Tried it a long time ago and didn't feel the need to share my pictures. Don't use Facebook app either, but I am not a very social person.

Re:Will never see the ads...

[tripleevenfall]

Don't worry, Zuckerberg will be putting banner ads on your lawn soon.

Easier to discover a business?!

[fustakrakich]

No. Easier to pick up a virus..

:-) Does android have a hosts file?

Re:Easier to discover a business?!

[sirber]

yes it does, but you need root access to modify it. else you can use a "local vpn" to block ads, but it slows a bit the phone.

BS

[smooth wombat]

"We found that Instagrammers were routinely tapping on a company's name from a direct response ad to learn more.

Routinely? The word they are looking for is "inadvertently". No one deliberately clicks or taps an ad unless they've been tricked into doing so.

The desperation to justify their existence is comical.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

No one deliberately clicks or taps an ad unless they've been tricked into doing so.

Yeah. I have much different finger gesture for advertisements.

Translation

[Nidi62]

In a statement, Instagram said, "We found that Instagrammers were routinely tapping on a company's name from a direct response ad to learn more."

Or, you know, users routinely click these ads by accident because they take up about a quarter of the screen (at least), or when trying to hit the tiny X button that is about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

ad tolerance level of desired audience

[sittingnut]

to state the obvious but not much mentioned fact, most of what are called tech companies are nothing more than ad pushers.
everything else is secondary.
all their tech and other hypes, and constant need to keep high media profile, is driven by that need to push ads through higher usage. that is why even most of the stories that appear here in slashdot about them are lacking in substance and highly exaggerated.

as market saturates they will push to the limit of ad tolerance of the users they have.

it is about time, that all stories and 'news' that come from or relate to these 'tech companies' be treated with extra level of skepticism. otherwise you are just helping them push ads, nothing more.

Re:ad tolerance level of desired audience

[bluefoxlucid]

What if I started a Facebook/Instagram type site with no ads, and with decent spam control, and charged $1/year for a subscription, paid for through Paypal or Amazon and accepting Visa Prepaid?

Re:ad tolerance level of desired audience

[110010001000]

Then you would go out of business. No one is going to pay for something that is "free". The money that drives these sites are the ad companies which are desperate to push their ads that everyone ignores.

Re:ad tolerance level of desired audience

[tripleevenfall]

Really, there's no need for intelligent users to pay even $1, when there are more than enough idiots clicking ads to make the whole thing free.

Same reason they don't charge admission to a casino.

Re:ad tolerance level of desired audience

[bluefoxlucid]

So people complaining about ads just want something to complain about, even though they apparently benefit? (From an economic standpoint, I think the advertisements drain more resources than alternatives, and people would be wealthier paying to use web sites than buying products that roll in a $50 billion ad budget; that requires a greater depth of thinking than I estimate most exercise.)

Re:ad tolerance level of desired audience

[Stan92057]

I would allow text ads or fill out a poll and no, decent spam controls isn't good enough that can be gotten everywhere.

Re:ad tolerance level of desired audience

[bluefoxlucid]

In the context of a pay-per-account service, decent spam control tends to evolve into "your e-mail/ip is blocked and you have to pay another dollar", and eventually into "your spam activity only ever reaches ~5-50 users, and you need ~20,000 per $1 cost to break even". Paywall spam filters are efficient because spammers rely on a model of spending hundreds of dollars to innundate hundreds of millions of users, and you can easily turn that cost into millions of dollars for the same volume exposure if your spam controls are reasonably effective. If your spam controls are Google or Facebook effective, it's no longer a market, at all.

From a service operator perspective, maximizing user satisfaction maximizes annual income, as any effective spam control strategy as such quickly drives spammers away, and the revenue from repeat spam attempts is minimal. For example: even if Facebook managed to squeeze $20 million per year out of spammers this way, they have 1.65 billion active users, meaning the difference between that and no spam account revenue is 2 cents per user. It's not worth losing any users, because a 2% loss represents 2% of users who would associate with other people who might get on Facebook to talk to them! If you think of it in terms of growth, you realize they got to 1.65 billion somehow, and 2% slower growth is a massive amount of lost revenue, so sinking the spammers is worth way more than leading them along with moderate-strength spam control.

The real issue is high-grade spam control tends to be expensive; it also tends to scale well once it's reached a certain threshold, not so well once it's reached a certain higher threshold.

So?

[110010001000]

I don't get it. Who cares? Don't all those apps have banners/ads/etc loaded with malware already?

Just another reason not to update my app...

[gosand]

I still have the old brown-and-tan icon. I won't update it until this one stops working - which I am sure will be soon, since they now have financial incentive to get people on the new app.

Re:Slashdot, an ad for adweek?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft will probably mod you down to -1 but just use this.

https://www.grc.com/never10.htm

Best ad & threat blocker?

[Anonymous Coward]

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Works vs. caps & HTTP PUSH ads w/ firewalls.

Avg. webpage = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... & ads = 40% of the size.

Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus (slows you) + less security issues/complexity. Compliments firewalls (w/ layered drivers blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lightens dns load). Gets data via 10 security sites.

APK

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Yay corporate-speak!

[SoftwareArtist]

Isn't it great how corporations have their own language? Apparently the correct English translation of, "to make it easier for people to discover a business they care about," is, "so we can sell more ads and make more money."

Will they ever figure out that no one is fooled by this BS? So you want to make money. Fine. I get that, and I don't have a problem with it. But please please please stop lying to us about everything you do! You don't have to pretend you're doing it for our good. Just say you're doing it to make more money and be done with it. I don't object to capitalism, but I do object to dishonest executives and marketers who couldn't say the truth to save their lives.