Media Issue #3 Ads on Instagram.

Reference: Google

Facebook purchased Instagram last year on the 9^th of April 2012 for a whopping $1 Billion in cash and stock. In case you do not know what Instagram is, it is a social networking service that focuses on picture and video uploadings. It was released on the 6^th of October in 2010 and in 3 years time managed to garner more than 30 million users.

This photo and video sharing social network did not have advertisements before Facebook bought it. However, recently Instagram has started to display advertisements. Facebook is ‘carefully adding magazine-quality photo ads to Instagram’ in order to bring in revenue from providing the service. They plan to include advertisers including Adidas, Burberry and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream just to name a few.

In my opinion, Instagram has particularly been successful because of it not having any advertisements. Instagrams’ design looks very classy and is also user friendly. Advertisements clutter the page and may cause confusion and annoyance to users. Being ad-free for such a long time, I think that Instagram should remain like that so that the number of users will continue to grow. Including advertising will defeat the purpose of a conventional social network site that shares photographs. Although there is a big growth in the market by including advertisements, Facebook should test a few users at a time to see the feedback that they get from including advertisements in this social network site. 

Companies on the other hand can gain so much by advertising on such a big market and this may increase the revenue earned for the company. Also, not forgetting, Facebook will be able to make even more revenue than it already is. 

Reference: Instagram Launches Ads