Ads are coming to Instagram, the company officially announced early this month.

According to its press release, Instagram will slowly feeds ads which users might be interested, but not necessarily follow.

According to your interests, Instagram will push selective Ads, that users might not follow , onto users’ news feed. These ads, which will be both image or video based will first come from only a small number of brands. However, users have the option to hide and dislike the ads they do not like, and provide feedback.

On the other hand, Instagram was acquired by Facebook last April with 1 billion dollars,  and Facebook announced last month that they are testing a new video feature with small group of users, too. When scrolling through their news feed, the video will automatically starts playing, but without audio. Only when the users click on play, the audio will come out. It is reasonable to believe that Facebook is using Instagram as a testing ground for future mobile ads marketing. While the number of social media users are increasing at steady speed, many marketers have laid their eyes on this huge consumer market and potential its potential marketing channel.

However, it is still unknown how well Instagram is going to tackle this. There is definitely some resistance at the beginning. As an Instagramer myself, i would not mind having ads on my feeds since it takes less than a second to bypass the ads i don’t like, but it really depends on the quality and relevance of these ads.  When i told this friends to my friends who are frequent Instagram users, they feel annoyed and skeptical about this marketing strategy and wonder how people would react when random ads  appearing on their feeds.

It is a big challenge for Instagram because it is a tradeoff between revenues from marketing services and users satisfaction. I am looking forward to seeing how Instagram is going to handle this.

 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/marketing/instagram-to-add-ads-to-its-feeds/article14685140/