The Facebook-owned app is ready to start making money by inserting ads into the feeds of its US users.
Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom at the company's press event for its video offering.
Instagram will soon be inserting photo and video ads into the stream
for its US members, the 3-year-old Facebook-owned service announced
Thursday. People will notice the "occasional ad" in the "next couple
months," Instagram said.
"Seeing photos and videos from brands you don't follow will be new, so we'll start slow," Instagram said in a blog post
on the change. "We'll focus on delivering a small number of beautiful,
high-quality photos and videos from a handful of brands that are already
great members of the Instagram community."
The ads have yet to make their appearance in Instagram's mobile
apps, CNET has confirmed, but the service is prepping people in advance
of their release so as to stave off a potential backlash from the
community. A Facebook spokesperson declined to provide exact timing on
the arrival of the ads.
The change, though expected, will be a radical one for the more than 150 million people who use Instagram's iOS and
Android
applications on a monthly basis. Though a boon for parent-company
Facebook's bottom line, the ads bring with them the potential to
alienate active users and could stir up a controversy like the one that bubbled up when Instagram temporarily changed its terms of service at the end of last year.
"As always, you own your own photos and videos. The introduction of
advertising won't change this," the company iterated so as to avoid a
similar dustup.
Instagram, for its part, is promising magazine-quality ads that "feel
as natural to Instagram as the photos and videos many of you already
enjoy from your favorite brands." The service also said that users can,
just as on Facebook, click to hide the ads they don't like.
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