Shortly after announcing it had reached 150 million active monthly users, an Instagram insider has confirmed that ads will soon be coming to the platform.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Emily White, Instagram's director of business operations, mentioned the service should be set to start selling ads within the next 12 months.
"We want to make money in the long-term, but we don't have any short-term pressure," said White.
Her comments serve as the first official recognition of how the social network plans to make money out of Instagram, and she certainly is hitting the ground running. White confirmed that the team conducted an extensive review of every business function before deciding to expand to 50 employees. This included four staff members who were tasked with managing brand relationships. White also confirmed that every major brand-marketer account on Instagram was catalogued, and that she has already met with bigwigs like Ford Motor and Coca-Cola.
The monetisation move comes as no surprise for many, who predicted that Instagram would have to start generating revenue following its purchase by Facebook. In December last year, Facebook's VP of global marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson, alluded to the fact that the social network was looking into ways to make Instagram profitable.
"There are many brands that use Instagram right now to try to get a feel for how to engage with their followers. We will definitely be figuring out a monetisation strategy," Everson said.
At this stage, there is no word on what the advertising will look like, but there are suggestions that ads will appear as part of the app's Discover feature, or could possibly be integrated into the Instagram search function. And the news that the image sharing app added 50 million monthly active users since February may be just the thing that Instagram needs to attract big brands with big advertising budgets.
White suggested that some retailers have shown interest in having product images that link directly to their Web site, cautioning that this concept would need to be executed carefully. She also acknowledged that the move could alienate users, but stressed that the Instagram team wanted to avoid repeating some of the mistakes Facebook made when it started its advertising efforts.
"I'm always looking at how to keep it simple," she said.
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