Instagram Rolls Out Plan For In-Feed Advertisments 60
New submitter cagraham writes "The currently ad-free Instagram has announced a plan to monetize its services by selling premium placement to brands. 35 year old Emily White is in charge of making Instagram profitable, according to the Wall Street Journal. The move shows the new priorities of parent-company Facebook, who now has to worry about appeasing shareholders, as well as fending off rivals such as Twitter. Whether Instagram's young and growing user base will balk at the ads, or even notice them, remains to be seen."
I think it is necessary (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I think it is necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, those bits of the Internet are still there, but they've been overwhelmed and vastly out-numbered by people more interested in money than being an intelligent, compassionate human being.
Re: (Score:1)
Ugh, that sounds educational. No way it will catch on.
Re: (Score:2)
Ugh, that sounds educational. No way it will catch on.
As cynical as you sound, it's taken me a long time to come to terms with the fact that most other people don't have the same sense of joy in learning for learning's sake. The thirst for self-improvement.
I still don't entirely understand a world like that, and am glad that not everyone is that way.
Re:I think it is necessary (Score:4, Funny)
Ignore is strength.
There is something profound here, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I tend to disagree on this one. I was there back in the day: the WWW was a lonely place filled with homepages that did not convey any useful information, Gopher was a commercial project (hence the reason why it failed), and the communities on Usenet were just as rude as most web fora nowadays.
I have some very, *very* major concerns about the modern Internet and our reliance on it colliding with its increasing potential to turn into a virtual panopticon. Yet, purely considering things in terms of content, I think it's too easy to over-idealise the old days.
I first used the Internet in late-1993, which is just about the point it was starting to cross over into mainstream consciousness, but when most of the old stuff was still in place (*). I remember how new and cool it seemed then, like "I can
Re: (Score:2)
No, the Internet used to be ad-free. People used to use the Internet to learn things, and to share information with other people. Until the unwashed massed got to it in the mid 90's, the Internet was wonderful: Email, Gopher, WWW, FTP, etc.
It used to be ad-free because the cost of running those services was trivial and handled by educational and research institutions.
Now the number of services has multiplied (by a lot), both to cater to a wider variety of experiences and a larger number of people.
The cost of running those services has multiplied (by a lot) - no longer just a few kilobytes of plain text, they are rich multimedia experiences including, in many cases gigabytes of high definition video.
I too remember the good old days of the "wo
Re: (Score:3)
No, the Internet used to be ad-free.
If you recall that was when the internet was subsidized an only available to very few. So instead of paying for the services that a few people can utilize with money the government confiscated from people it is now paid for by companies trying to sell a product and available to everyone.
People used to use the Internet to learn things, and to share information with other people. Until the unwashed massed got to it in the mid 90's, the Internet was wonderful: Email, Gopher, WWW, FTP, etc.
People still use the internet to learn things and share information, now they can also use it to make money. Further even before the "unclean masses" had the internet there were games and many other noneducational things hap
Re: (Score:3)
So every time a web site or app starts showing ads, people stop using it? How is Google still in business? How is Slashdot still in business?
Ad-blockers? - They make the experience tolerable and allows the visitors to focus on the subject matter, not some noisy, bouncing, obscuring- or attention-grabbing ad for something nobody really needs.
Using good ad-blockers helps keep the Internet almost completely ad free, the way it should be.
I fully agree, but (Score:2)
Damm. (Score:1, Insightful)
Is there anything advertisers can't turn to shit?
Whoops.... (Score:5, Funny)
My finger slipped. Instead of clicking on the "premium ad experience" I accidentally uninstalled Instagram from my phone.
Damn those fat fingers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What ads? [bigtincan.com] I don't know what you're talking about. [adblockplus.org]
Of course, my device is rooted - and I claim it's irresponsible for carriers to try to prevent users from doing such.
Re:Can anything be immune from ads? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would love to see a social gathering site whereby people pay a small annual fee
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I would love to see a social gathering site
Yeah, but you wouldn't pay for it. That's the problem.
In any case, those places still exist. Try logging on to FICS, or one of the newsgroups still around.
Why is age relevant? (Score:1)
Why does this summary mention Emily White’s age? What possibile relevance could that have to the story? Is there something implicit in her age that means she’ll do a better or worse job than someone of a different age?
In the context of the article it might be slightly useful as an index to point out how generally young the company is, with a 35 year old COO. But why tell us in the summary? Why not something *informative* like “director of business operations” or “chief executiv
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it was meant to imply that, since the average age of instagram users is in the low 2-digits, this decision, and the person making it, are out of touch with their "market?"
Nah, damn kids are the worst at sucking down marketing drek... Even my lawn is getting popups now.
Made me click to see if she was hot (Score:2)
I figure anybody that far up the corporate ladder at age 35 must be at least pretty.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm close to her age although we might as well be on different planets when it comes to our roles within our respective companies. I can't even comprehend how someone my age could rise to such a high executive level. The only career path I've seen like hers requires growing up in an affluent neighborhood where connections and opportunities are plentiful. It leads to an impressive resume because they got to land jobs no one else would have ever gotten on merit alone. I'm not suggesting she isn't talented, bu
xkcd - Instagram (Score:3, Insightful)
http://xkcd.com/1150/ [xkcd.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The web used to work fine before it was full of ads everywhere
So in your model how does a site like YouTube work? Is the tremendous bandwidth and storage funded exclusively by subscriptions?
Re: (Score:2)
Why should a site like YouTube be needed? If everyone had to host their own video content, perhaps we'd have come to useful video standards long ago? Certainly having the majority of on-line content in one place is useful for the copyright cartel, but what does it do for the rest of us?
The other alternative would be to have ads, but not have them fill up every available space. If ads were rare and tasteful, say a single simpIe text link on each page, I wo
Re: (Score:2)
what does it do for the rest of us?
- Allows the Khan Academy to share videos which educate the world for free.
...to name but two. I know ads drive the Slashdot batshit bananas crazy, but f*ck, get over it. How does a 10 second ad for a Chevy ruin your life?
- Allows Grandma to watch videos of her grandkids from hundreds of miles away without effort, and allows me to upload those videos without effort.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a good question. I think, in theory, that a distributed solution could handle it. You would need a distributed peer-to-peer protocol which also handles storage and discovery. The actual data transfer could be done though something like bittorrent, but with blocks downloaded chronologically.
Services like gnutella, e-donkey etc. actually do something relatively similar to youtube when you think of it.
Insta-what? (Score:3)
In my day we passed along life experiences with stories and interpretive dance. Kids these days.
What sort of question is that? (Score:2)
Whether Instagram's young and growing user base will balk at the ads, or even notice them, remains to be seen.
Nah, I'm sure that polluting the content won't have any impact. After all, everyone loves advertising.
My first thought on reading this: ads in your pics (Score:1)
Who? (Score:3)
What's an Instagram?
Is that like a Polaroid, only 15 years after losing relevance?
now I get it (Score:1)
Pressgram (Score:1)
I like the idea behind Instagram, but not the proprietary nature of it. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I don't like giving up my rights to work I create. I dislike, as Nicholas Carr termed it, "digital sharecropping" [roughtype.com] And, of course, now the ads have finally started on Instagram, solidifying my discomfort with it.
But, recently, there's a new program, Pressgram [pressgr.am], that's a free iPhone app (with an Android app coming soon, hopefully), which allows an Instagram-like experience, but uploads the phot