While I think this may be solution for a controlling entity to ruin a platform. I don't think it does anything for when the users themselves begin pushing advertisements through content. Which is what I believe really ruins platforms.
For example a lot of Fitness Instagrammers start of by just posting of them working out or their daily lives. As they get popular, they start a clothing line, offer training, write ebooks, get sponsorships. Their instgram is now mostly for pushing those products on people.
Assuming Instagram is behind this, it is bad business to do that. Instagram by itself is nothing, it's users are what made the service, and showing a lack of respect for them it is their worse publicity.
They keep starting out with a free service then they focus on turning it into a paid service... In Instagram's case, just like with Twitter and even TikTok now, they charge users for visibility, or they trickle it out just enough to make users constantly and feverishly ask what they're doing wrong. It's mental manipulation that just doesn't work, and the paid advertising format leads platforms to their death, but just like users keep posting, investors are flocking to put money onto the next social media platform.
I hope that independent web communities return, and that people start making their own web sites, tracking music and entertainment across multiple platforms and dealing with their content payola schemes and repetitive marketing is ruining everything fun and useful about the Internet.
I really dislike this entire mentality so much. At what point did we go from a place where you have a diverse set of companies making good revenues and profits and serve their audiences well to this crappy model of everyone trying to be the next Instagram.
Adult content creators are probably going to get booted off at some point for 'ad-friendliness' despite the fact that they helped build most of it.
So here was my take. Fitness influencing is a microcosm representative of the bigger picture on Instagram. IG is tailor made for advertising. It's visually sumptuous, low information density, one-to-many communication. Surfing IG doesn't engage the higher brain functions. It's all sentiment driven.
Marketers love that. So the platform has attracted people with marketing-oriented brains. So now we have this whole trend of influencers going on there, and basically just being marketers for one product or another, and making careers and businesses out of it. And IG is so good for that, that most of what you come across nowadays is turning out to be sponsored commercial content.
That's what I got from the article, and it's a great point, as multiple influencers actually say in the article, it's a great place to make posts that have commercial intent, but they don't even use social media, or consume Instagram, they just post their advertisements.
IG is basically becoming cable TV, one-way, minimal interactivity, people constantly pushing advertisements at you. All that's changed is some guy in a suit now assigns $X of his annual marketing budget to some roided up IG influencer and then gets on with his work day.
I'd love it if there was some platform where spending money actually reduces your reach, that's a platform I would use, specifically because it'd be a terrible tool for marketers.
Those work together. But I find the most insidious aspect of these platforms is how it allows companies to exploit our vulnerability to unhealthy behavior. Even if you grant that Instagram's content isn't toxic (which it is, but just hypothetically), the ads are terrible. I, for example, don't drink. I was never an alcoholic per se, but I had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and in many ways I miss it. Instagram shows me ads all the time trying to convince me how fun it is to drink, and why so-and-so drink is delicious and amazing. Now extend this to shopping additions, misinformation campaigns, et cetera.
The problem is not with instagram but with capitalism. Capitalism is a system designed to optimize for profit, so the only advertisers that want to target you are advertisers who can profit from those ads. Vices make profit, insecurity makes profit, promoting positive mental health does not make profit.
In time we'll look back on this wild west of social media consumption just like how we look back on smoking. This stuff needs to be regulated.
Thanks for the perspective. I was an early Instagram user, but deleted my account not so long after they introduced stories.
Recently, I registered a new account, and after a grace period without ads, I was surprised by just how drenched it has become in advertising. I used it to follow professional athletes. First of, many of the organic posts are themselves sponsored advertising, then the athletes share brand posts from their sponsors, and then between every story you get an actual ad.
Of course, with more personal connections the trade of might be different, but for my use case described above Instagram seemed unsustainable.
What's interesting to me about Instagram is that there are a ton of ads. Probably more than Facebook. But unlike Facebook, the most valuable ads run on the platform (and the ads most preferred by users) are from transactions that take place off of the platform.
When Louis Vuitton wants to advertise on Instagram they don't open the Instagram Ad Manager. They call Kylie Jenner and pay her to post a photo. And not only do users not mind those ads - a lot of users seem to enjoy them. People actually seek out those types of ads. It's incredible engagement. But Instagram doesn't make a penny.
And then the FTC, usually Facebook's nemesis, comes along and hands them a silver bullet to monetize Instagram without harming user engagement: Social Media Endorsement Guidelines.[1]
If users are legally required to disclose when they've been paid to post something via #ad or #sponsored then Instagram could easily charge a small fee for every thousand views/comments/likes on those posts. Consider it a small tax for monetizing an otherwise free platform. They could even charge accounts a small annual "hosting" fee based on the number of followers to unlock/use the legally-required hashtags or for the ability to include hyperlinks. Is Kylie Jenner going to turn down a million dollars from Louis Vuitton because she'll get a $1,500 dollar bill from Instagram? Doubtful. She puts out content users want to consume. Instagram would get paid as the platform that brought all of those users together. Advertisers could still reach their audience and users wouldn't be, ya know, stalked.
But what has Facebook done to monetize Instagram? The same thing they did with Facebook - cheap, high-volume surveillance advertising for $5/CPM. Instead of figuring out a way to monetize the advertisements that users like, Facebook decided to sprinkle their feeds with crappy/creepy t-shirt designs, drop-shipped Alibaba junk, and vitamins/CBD/essential oils that very well might kill them.
If Instagram goes belly up Zuck & Sandberg have no one to blame but themselves.
In response to 3. I'd argue it's a much bigger factor than we'd think. Instagram as a platform is now based almost entirely around influencers creating an idealised and unattainable representation of a lifestyle and then selling ad space for your product to be seen as part of that lifestyle.
All social media enables/encourages this to a certain degree and I think the personal touch and reach that individuals give to the products they promote is potentially far more subtle and harmful than the banner ads we typically think of as problematic.
Maybe misreading, but a lot of major Instagram publishers exist through product sponsorship.
Letting publishers have control of this sort of linking increases the value of the sponsorship, thus helping out content creators. Like how YouTube's ad-revenue sharing supports people making videos.
I would see this more as a way for content creators to monetize better than for Instagram to monetize.
what you propose might work, or it might work against the core purpose of the social network.
As far as I know (no Instagram user), Instagram works (for a certain demographic) on the basis that its users are ok with random semi-anonymous strangers liking their photos and following and linking their profile.
If you take away or limit that, what are you left with? will your users be content?
and more importantly, will advertisers keep spending the same or more money on your platform?
The main “feature” of Instagram was that it was free of politics, tribalism, and the news cycle. Then came the activists looking to leverage the captive audiences and the attention of their friend circles for their cause. This change invited those of all causes and parties to participate, because to not do so would be to accept a marketing disadvantage.
The political marketing war escalated quickly. Now Instagram has turned into the same cesspool other platforms have - whether it is YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or Facebook - with advanced campaigning, mass manipulation, etc. Like Twitter, it suffers due to the limited format - images allow for a charged newsbite and no nuance whatsoever. I’m starting to think any centralized platform that is very open to the public or doesn’t ban politics will ultimately decay once weaponized.
What I would be worried about is that the same practices of monetization that killed Facebook are seeping into Instagram. At what point are they just a poison that slowly kills anything it touches? I think they already are but the deaths are slow.
The advertising industry will find a way to do that regardless of the medium - whether it’s Instagram or whether it’s a shitty blog with AdSense on it.
Your criticism should probably extend to the way the entire advertising industry conducts it’s operations and that’s a massive discussion with an incredible amount of nuance that we probably couldn’t do it justice here.
A few years ago there was a ton of websites that did little more than copy Instagram photos and put their own ads around it. I suspect putting an end to those was the point.
I was about to delete my Instagram account when I saw this, but having given it a bit of thought, I'm actually ok with it.
Instagram needs to get money from somewhere, and as far as I'm concerned selling my photos is preferable to filling the feeds with ads. However I can see how for a lot of people they'd rather have ads then have their photos sold (especially pro photographers) so it'll be interesting to see how many users they loose over this.
Also it goes with out saying that if they do put adverts in, I'm out.
For example a lot of Fitness Instagrammers start of by just posting of them working out or their daily lives. As they get popular, they start a clothing line, offer training, write ebooks, get sponsorships. Their instgram is now mostly for pushing those products on people.
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