[dropcap style=”2″ color=”#f50a0a” text=”P”]hoto-sharing Facebook subsidiary Instagram has announced that it will soon start serving ads to its US users, including photos and videos. Instagram, as it has long promised to do, will begin introducing advertisements into U.S. user feeds in the “next couple [of] months.” The company said it will roll out ads “for brands you don’t follow” slowly, and that it will distribute them as “high-quality photos and videos.”
[blockquote style=”quote” align=”” author=”Mark Zuckerberg said last July”]The focus then was still on increasing Instagram’s “footprint” and that it was too soon to talk about how it planned to make money. [/blockquote]
Facebook completed its acquisition of Instagram for $715m in September 2012, but it has kept fairly quiet about the property since then, except to say that its user base keeps growing. On Thursday, the company described Instagram as “a global community of more than 150 million people.”
That thinking now appears to have changed, but Instagram says it plans to introduce advertising gradually, beginning with a limited number of spots that will only be shown to US-based users for now.
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“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.”
Instagram also tried to put users at ease by noting they would have control over what ads they see. “If you see an ad you don’t like, you’ll be able to hide it and provide feedback about what didn’t feel right,” the company wrote. “We’re relying on your input to help us continually improve the Instagram experience.”
