Skip to main content

Get ready: there could be more ads in Instagram’s future

It’s possible that Instagram users will see more ads in their favorite photo- and video-sharing app going forward as parent company Meta is apparently experimenting with new kinds of ads.

MarketWatch reported on Tuesday that Meta announced that Instagram would see “three new advertising types.” These new ad types are Explore ads, profile feed ads, and the third type was described as a “multi-advertiser ad.”

Related Videos

The new Explore ads will, as you might imagine, appear in the Explore tab of the app and basically be visible as sponsored posts. Profile feed ads are expected to appear while users are scrolling through the posts of other users’ profiles. (This is not the same as viewing other people’s posts in your feed. Profile feeds are feeds of posts that only feature various posts from one user’s profile. It’s the feed that appears when you visit an Instagram profile and click on an individual post. Doing so lets you scroll though all their other posts. So profile feed ads are essentially ads that would appear among those posts.)

“Multiadvertiser ads” are also expected to be trialed on Instagram. These ads would involve seeing thematically similar additional ads “underneath” an ad that a user initially interacts with.

Do all of these new types of ads automatically mean IG users will see more ads in the app? It sure seems like it. But for now it seems that outcome is still up in the air, at least according to TechCrunch. Instagram did not tell TechCrunch if the new kinds of ads would definitively increase the number of ads Instagram users would have to view. But TechCrunch did say that Instagram mentioned “that the number would vary based on how people use the app.”

Editors' Recommendations

Twitter begins rollout of new gray check marks only to abruptly remove them
Elon Musk.

In the middle of writing an article about Twitter's initial rollout of a new gray check mark verification badge, we noticed something odd: Twitter accounts that had the new gray check marks only minutes earlier were suddenly without them again. So what happened?

Elon Musk apparently happened. Mere hours after his newly purchased social media platform began its rollout of a new gray check mark in an effort to help clarify which high-profile accounts were actually verified, the new gray check marks began disappearing from various accounts, evidently at Musk's behest. Just take a look at this tweet conversation between web video producer Marques Brownlee and Musk:

Read more
Mastodon surpasses 1 million monthly active users as Twitter backlash worsens
Series of four mobile screenshots showing Mastodon's sign-up process.

Mastodon, an alternative to Twitter that's been getting a lot of attention lately, just surpassed 1 million monthly active users this week, all while Twitter struggles to deal with the  backlash caused by recently announced changes to its platform.

On Monday, Eugen Rochko, founder and CEO of Mastodon, announced via a Mastodon post that the social media platform now has "1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today." This news comes after a particularly tumultuous week (and weekend) for Twitter after Elon Musk took over the popular microblogging platform just last month.

Read more
Twitter is reportedly working on paid DMs to celebrities
The Twitter app on the Sony XPeria 5 II.

In what appears to be another effort to help Twitter generate revenue at the start of its Elon Musk era, the social media platform is reportedly working on paid Direct Messaging (DM), with a particular emphasis on those paid messages being sent to celebrities.

On Thursday, The New York Times published a report in which it mentioned that -- according to internal documents it saw and "two people with knowledge of the work" -- that Twitter was working on a paid DM feature that would allow users to send messages to celebrities for a fee. The fee structure for this feature apparently hasn't been officially finalized yet, but The Times did note that it could be "as little as a few dollars per direct message."

Read more