This Is What the Ads in Your Instagram Feed Will Look Like
Oct. 24, 2013 — -- Soon there will be advertisements mixed in with the selfies, food porn and cute puppy shots in your Instagram feed, but the photo-sharing site will work to blend the ads with those high-quality images in your feed.
Today Instagram released a sample photo of what an advertisement will look like on its site. The ad, which is made by Instagram, shows a photo and a small "sponsored" logo above it. Instagram will begin to run the native ad on the network itself to give U.S. users a feel for how it will look.
Every ad will have that sponsored label, which when tapped will bring users to an explainer about the Instagram advertising program. And as they can on Facebook, users can hide the ad and explain why they don't like a specific ad. "This will help show you more interesting ads in the future," Instagram explained in a blog post today.
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At first Instagram will only be working with a select number of companies, including Ben & Jerry's, Burberry, General Electric, Levi's, and Lexus.
"It looks like Instagram is being hyper cautious with this," Rebecca Lieb, an industry analyst at the the Altimeter Group, told ABC News. "They have hand selected only 10 brands, and they have selected the brands based on the quality of their Instagram feeds."
The new advertisements will mark Instagram's first foray into monetizing its service. While it has 150 million active users, Instagram and Facebook, which acquired the company in April 2012 for a $1 billion, have left it clean of ads or marketing.
"They can afford to wait. They have a very deep-pocketed wealthy parent," Lieb said. "They are going to be hyper cautious about the rollout."
In that vein, the company emphasizes at the end of the post that users' photos or videos will not appear in ads. "As always, you own your own photos and videos," the post reads. "The introduction of advertising won't change this."
