Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy

Wil Wheaton on Instagram's new ad policy
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Axiom 2: Company does not charge you for this service

Axiom 3: Company has no other visible means of income

Axiom 4: Company has non-trivial operating expenses

Given that this covers a huge amount of "our digital life", there are a few possible solutions:

- Keep getting services without paying money but paying with privacy

- Identify another way to get the services we rely on to be paid for

- Hope that a large benefactor company will buy the services we use and write the operational cost off out of the goodness of their hearts

No, they are NOT going to do that.

It's 2012. Why are people --and especially someone like Wheaton-- behaving like it's 1994 and they are learning this "web" thing for the first time?

I've seen the same bloody story play up 10 or 20 times. They made a BS change on their license terms, they are is gonna be a small fuss from their users about it and they are gonna revert it.

It's not like Instagram-the-company even intended to do that in the first place -- most likely they screwed up the phrasing but meant something extremely more limited (like: we'd have be able to use your pics when advertising Instagram-the-app itself).

Instead, people are acting like Instagram was really going to sell their photos and not pay them, and like this thing won't be revoked in less than a month.

That is absurd.

Why?

1) The backslash from the users, especially with 2-3 active competitors against the company (Twitter, which added photo filters to its app, being the latest heavyweight).

2) The lawsuits from users their photos they did attempt to sell.

3) It's not a way to make money, anyway. Instagram is not a Getty Images like company -- and limited size pictures with cliched filters is not exactly a stock image market. Getty actually partners with Flickr, which has actual photos of ALL kinds and PAYS the photographer if it uses the pictures, but it's not like anything lucrative came out of it, for either Flickr, Getty or the users.

> Seth Green walking through an Urban Outfitters, does that mean Urban Outfitters can take that image and use it to create an implied endorsement by Seth?

- Unless walking through an Urban Outfitters requires agreeing with TOS before entering it, the exemple is irrelevant. When you sign up for facegoogram , you basically sign a binding contract. Wether the terms are fair , or even legal or not, it is another issue.

Yes, this backlash from users is exactly what's happening. You can't simultaneously try to dissuade the backlash from happening and depend on it to prevent the undesirable events from taking place.