A competitor to Facebook at the beginning, Instagram has went on to become one of the Facebook’s most profitable endeavours, bringing in increasing ad revenue year over year. But is money ever enough? Not really and hence, Facebook has now found yet another way to show you ads on Instagram. The platform will now get a new ‘Suggested Posts’ feature, that will make random posts appear after you have watched everything you follow.
The feature comes to replace the “You’re all caught up” notification which appears after you have scrolled past everything that’s been posted in the last 3 days by the people/pages you follow. Instagram, in a bid to further constrain the time users spend on its app (or increase it?) has decided to utilise this place to serve ads.
Now, this might have one of the following two effects. First, people might close their Instagram after coming face to face with dozens of ads(even though the section will have normal posts) on a dedicated section of the feed. However, on the flip side, this might give users more content to scroll through after they have already seen everything from the people they follow, thus expanding the time spent on Instagram by a great degree. Moreover, it just so happens that it will allow Instagram to serve more ads and extract greater revenues from the market (we will let you figure out which is more likely).
Much like the ads that appear on other parts of the app (the feed or stories) the Suggested Posts section will also contain ads based on your preferences. This means that these ads might actually be able to catch your attention, and increase your scrolling time (who out of us has not spent hours adding stuff to our Amazon cart and buying nothing?).
Moreover, the section will also contain actual posts from accounts you don’t follow which Instagram thinks you might like. This makes Suggested Posts another Instagram maze that you might find yourself stuck in for hours on end. The company is also bringing some colour to its hashtags, which can be found using a hashtag generator.
Instagram is doubling down on its ‘online marketplace’ business, and introduced QR codes to help retailers, who will now be able to give customers their Instagram handles through QR codes that can be scanned through your phone’s camera.
