Ads may come to Instagram

Either: Facebook have no imagination. Or: Slate (and the internet) has the wrong end of the stick.

Scenario the first.

So FB dropped a cool billion on a photo-sharing social network and app with a sizeable, vehemently dedicated and pretty damn vocal userbase. Now they want to make money out of it. Fine.

"So guys, Instagram monetization. Hit me." "Um." "Um." "Ads?" "Perfect!"

I (and I'm sure a large majority of Instagram users) am pretty much instantly put off by ads. Especially in-app or in-feed apps. Any ad space sold on my screen is pretty much money wasted.

Scenario the second.

There have to be other ways to make money from Instagram that make one iota of sense given the community and demographic. Premium filters maybe? I'm just sayin'.

Users don't really have any right to be upset over not being able to use services completely for free. Is this what the world has come to? Start-ups make their service free initially until they've gotten enough users, then try to monetize and then the users hop on to the next free service. And repeat. Either user expectations have to change, or start-ups will have to realize that they need to start monetize right away.

^ this. or something like this. It always bugs me that the only way anyone has figured out how to monetize anything online is by throwing up some ads on it. Its ugly, intrusive, and the users end up pretty much tuning them out anyway. Surely there has to be a better way to make money.

-prints, photobooks, physical stuff like that. people into making their photos look vintagey would surely love to place their fake polaroid next to their record collection.

-All instagram images are geotagged and timestamped. How about you partner with media outlets and allow them to leverage all the images being taken for specific events? "instagram @ SXSW" or whatever.

-"license this image" - Lets say I run a food blog. clearly a great place to look for imagery of food is on instagram. I could affordably license the image and give money to the photographer (and instagram gets a cut.)

-etc, etc, etc,

These are just off the top of my head. I'm not saying these are brilliant ideas, or that they would necessarily work at all. What I am saying is that I wish that we'd explore solutions outside of "lets plaster ads all over it." It's an ineffective way of making money that's just stolen from the slowly-dying magazine industry, and is that really the industry you want to emulate?

They've never confirmed they're doing ads.

But I would think something similar to in game items would work great. Aviary for instance has a great set of standard filters, and some "extras" you can buy. I have already purchased one.

Would I have clicked on an ad anytime in the next year? probably not

Ugh, you're right. The actual quote:

    BI: Will you put ads in Instagram?
    CE: Eventually we'll figure out a way to monetize Instagram.

So they're a basically just leaving the option on the table...

This is modern media 101.