According to a Wall Street Journal report, the popular photo-sharing app Instagram will soon be monetize. How? By selling ads of course.
Ever since Instagram started as an iOS-only application back in 2010, it never had ads popping out suddenly while browsing or tried to persuade you to purchase anything to use it. That didn’t changed when it was ported to Android even it had more users than before. Instagram currently has more than 150 million of active users each month. That is 128 million more since Facebook acquired the popular photo-sharing app in April 2012. With that, they are now planning how to implement ads and it will roll out within the next year.
How will the ads be implemented? Emily White, Director of Business Operations of Instagram, and her team are focusing on the app’s Explore tab that promotes popular content and also the search function that allows users to discover images and tags. Ms White also stated that some retailers also are keen in ad products that will allow users to click on images of products that link to a retailer’s own site but this will have to undergo such study because mobile sites still needs polishing.
On a local setting, some prominent product placements are already in Instragram through the ever popular hashtags. Even celebrities uses certain hashtags for their fans to use in order to be featured. Hashtags in Instagram works the same way as Twitter and even Facebook, except that Twitter ranks the popular hashtags into trends.
Let’s hope that monetizing Instagram won’t ruin the simple and clean experience that made it popular. What are your thoughts on this? Maybe you have better ideas on how to implement the ads? Comment your thoughts below.
On a side note, maybe they should work on Instagram for Windows Phone before this.
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