What do you feel when you first saw the title: Instagram begins to add ads? To be honest, when I first saw it, the first thing that pumped into my mind was: what? again? After Facebook added random advertisements on its homepage, Instagram is also going to be “polluted”.

I think this is somewhat related to business ethics. It is true that the company can gain much more profits from adding ads. However, it is for sure that users may get disappointed or even annoyed to some extent. But meanwhile, even though the users are not satisfied, they know they cannot quit and they have to keep using it because Facebook and Instagram are pretty much dominating the socializing market, and the company knows as well. As a result, a choice between profit and consumer occurs. However, we cannot blame the company for choosing “money” because for most of the companies, profit maximization is always their goal.

Compared to Facebook, I think Instagram has more ethics. Because according to the article, Instagram would choose ads that match users’ interests whereas Facebook just plugged in some random ads. In addition, the type of ads in Instagram is “beautiful, high-quality photos and videos from a handful of brand”. This means that there is still a high possibility that users will like the ads and then really follow the brand, which is more effective than ads in Facebook.

Personally, I can accept and understand the action of Instagram but I just hope that in the future, my Instagram would not be overwhelmed by ads LOL.

See the link below to read the original article:

http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/03/technology/social/instagram-ads/index.html