Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s photo-sharing subsidiary, which the company purchased for $715 million a little over a year ago, announced that it will begin bringing photo and video ads to the platform in the coming weeks. Facebook also announced its intention to begin using video ads shortly on users’ Timeline earlier this year. For now, the Instagram roll-out of ads will be limited to users in the United States though one would expect that this will be extended in the future.
“We have big ideas for the future, and part of making them happen is building Instagram into a sustainable business,” a company flack wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
Facebook describes Instagram as a global community
Since the purchase of the company, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has had little to say. This changed last week when Facebook described Instagram as “a global community of more than 150 million people.”
In July, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that they were still working on building Instagram’s “footprint” and that it was still premature to begin speaking of how the site would make money for Facebook. Apparently, that “footprint” needed to reach 150 million before ads were going to be shown. It’s believed that the ads will be rolled out slowly to its U.S. users.
“Seeing photos and videos from brands you don’t follow will be new, so we’ll start slow,” the blog post explained. “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 will be “enjoyable and creative”
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has remained cagey in reference to which companies’ ads would be rolled out first though it promised that the ads would be “enjoyable and creative.” A reach for unsolicited ads to be sure, though the company did say that users can both hide ads and complain about them so they may be on the right track towards its goal to “continually improve the Instagram experience.”
Ads on a free service like Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) or Instagram were just an inevitability; one that few can complain about with too much fervor. That said, it’s fairly safe to say that a number of users will rail against the invasion despite its nonexistent cost.
