Instagram announced its intentions to make money using ads some time back when its Terms of Service changed were suddenly changed to include such ridiculous things like all photos shared on the service belonged to it (it later denied that) and could be sold off to companies and brands for for use in marketing and other commercial purposes. That obviously did not go down well with most Instagram users and the backlash was so intense that Instagram had to back out, apologize and rethink its moneytization strategy. Rethink they did and now they’ve come up with instream ads. They announced this a few weeks ago and now they are out to go forward.
Instagram has posted an image and explanation on its official blog detailing how how the ads will be displayed on the Instagram feed. The ads will have the “Sponsored” tag appear where you normally see the timestamp. The three dots that you usually click to report an image shared as inappropriate or to copy and share the URL of an image will now give you an option to hide the ad. In order to better be served ads that you may be interested in seeing, Instagram will read the data so that in future you are presented with more targeted ads. They’ll read your data from Facebook, what phoos you “Like” and from Instagram what photos you “Favourite” and comment on and use it to serve ads that you may actually be interested in.
How will the ads look like? Like this:
