Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired
Instagram will soon begin serving ads.
That’s only what you’d expect from the company that Facebook paid $1 billion for in the spring of last year, just weeks before going public.
“We have big ideas for the future, and part of making them happen is building Instagram into a sustainable business,” reads a blog post from the company. “In the next couple months, you may begin seeing an occasional ad in your Instagram feed if you’re in the United States.”
The post acknowledges that photo and video ads aren’t what the average web user has come to expect from the company’s mobile image-sharing service, but if you hadn’t quite realized it, this is the way the online world works. In the beginning, Twitter and Facebook weren’t ad machines either, but eventually, social media must pay for itself. And the pressure for profits only rises when a company sells shares to the public — which even the an idealist like Mark Zuckerberg is eventually forced to do.
The news from Instagram comes just as Twitter as preparing to release the details of its IPO, which could hit Wall Street as early as next month.
Facebook’s IPO was a bit rocky in the beginning, but it has slowly turned things around as it began to convince Wall Street that it could make money from mobile advertisements. Instagram is just another step along this road.
The company says the ads will come from brand names that users do not “follow” on its service, but users will have the option of “hiding” an ad and telling the company what they don’t like about it. The ads will “start slow,” but that just means it will eventually speed up — at least to the point of profit.
Cade Metz is the editor of Wired Enterprise. Got a NEWS TIP related to this story -- or to anything else in the world of big tech? Please e-mail him: cade_metz at wired.com.
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