Instagram announced today that they will begin including ads between stories on their social network. The ads should work similar to how they do on Snapchat. Where there are ads between people’s stories. So when you finish with one person’s story, you’ll see an ad and then another story. It’s unclear how often we’ll see these ads, but they are coming, according to the company. This move isn’t surprising, considering the fact that video ads make more money than your standard ads, and after all that is how Instagram and their parent company Facebook make their money. Instagram also announced that over 150 million people use Instagram Stories every single day.
According to Instagram’s head of product management for monetization, Vishal Shah, the ads for stories will initially roll out with just 30 advertisers. So you may not see an abundance of ads in the next few days. But Shah did not that the feature will be available to all advertisers globally “within weeks”. So it appears to be a somewhat limited rollout that will expand to many more users in due time. For Instagram, this means more ad spots, and more cash. Which is a big deal seeing as Facebook recently announced that they are running out of spots to sell ads on their news feed, and since advertising is their main source of income, they had to come up with something.
Back in August, Instagram announced Stories which was essentially a straight-up ripoff of Snapchat. This is primarily because Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO, had offered to buy Snapchat but they turned him down. So he opted to create Snapchat inside Instagram, and so far it appears to be doing better than Snapchat. The 150 million daily users that Instagram is boasting right now, is the same number that Snapchat is boasting, and Instagram has been at it for far less time than Snapchat. Of course, a big part of this is likely due to the fact that Stories is a new feature and not the entire social network, as well as the fact that Instagram has been around much longer and has gained a huge following over the years.