Instagram is free to use, and as they say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. This means that users have had to put up with ads, which come in the form of ads injected in between their main feed and also inside of Instagram’s Stories. Now it looks like Instagram users will need to start putting up with even more ads, this time in their Explore feed.
Speaking to The Verge in an interview, Instagram’s director of business Susan Buckner Rose was quoted as saying, “Explore is where people are really open to discovery, and that’s why we’re really excited about this.” The ads won’t actually appear in the Explore feed’s grid layout, but rather it will show up when you tap on a photo or video, so you’ll have to view the ad first before diving into the rest of your feed’s content.
While Instagram seems to feel like the Explore feed is the best place to insert ads, due to how people use it to discover people or brands they don’t typically follow, at the same time we’re not sure if users will be too thrilled by it. However, as we said, Instagram is a free-to-use service and as such the company needs to come up with ways to monetize it, so that means inserting ads wherever possible.