1. Facebook is a for profit company.<p>2. Facebook probably wants to seek a direct monetary ROI on Instagram.<p>3. Facebook may or may not have figured out that strategy. Either way, not revealing those details is an indication of nothing beyond standard business practice.<p>4. Some users don't like ads, which is evident by the popularity of ad blocking tools.<p>5. Some users don't mind ads, some even click on them, which is evident by the revenue ads generate.<p>What part of this article brings anything new to the table that we haven't known for months/years?
Kind of a condescending article. Really, Instagram pulled an enormous bait-and-switch. Create a great application, give it away for free until you've built up a huge base of users, then sell the application and its user base to another company and let them figure out how to actually make money off it.<p>Understandably users are going to be upset because they're being asked to either pay for or see ads with something that they used to get for free and ad-free. People will always be upset when you take something away, even if you gave it to them for free.
Either: Facebook have no imagination.
Or: Slate (and the internet) has the wrong end of the stick.<p>Scenario the first.<p>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.<p>"So guys, Instagram monetization. Hit me."
"Um."
"Um."
"Ads?"
"Perfect!"<p>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.<p>Scenario the second.<p>There have to be other ways to make money from Instagram that make <i>one iota</i> of sense given the community and demographic. Premium filters maybe? I'm just sayin'.
They don't really need 'ads', just corporate accounts, right?<p>When someone creates an account they could immediately be following a Coca Cola, BMW and Apple instagram account.<p>They could even make it a requirement to follow a small number of brands.<p>I for one wouldn't be too pissed if an occasional cool picture of an apple store or BMW came up in my feed...
Headline in a year: "Instagram Owners Appalled To Learn That Users Don't Like Ads"<p>The fact of the matter is that, as long as the VC treadmill keeps moving, there will be start-ups earlier in the cycle willing to take the place of start-ups like Instagram and Facebook (which are trying to find a way towards profitability).
Articles that cherry pick comments from Twitter and then announce it as some sweeping generalization need to stop. The evidence for the headline is based on 4 screenshots of some random tweets.<p>It happened recently with the MS vs Android malware 'backlash' and also when Instagram was released for Android.<p>Just because you can cherry pick tweets from the vocal minority to form your attention grabbing headline doesn't mean it applies to the entire user base.
The title of this should be "Facebook is looking at ways to monetize its billion dollar investments, much like every other public company in world."<p>I'm not sure how this is even worthy of an article.
They've never confirmed they're doing ads.<p>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.<p>Would I have clicked on an ad anytime in the next year? probably not
Hopefully they have a simple ad-free version of the app costing anywhere between $1.00-$5.00, for those of us that don't mind paying for an ad free experience.