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

By Anita George October 4, 2022

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.”

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.”

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