With 150 million users, Instagram thinks advertisements

Instagram has some big plans up its sleeve. The photo-sharing app from Facebook’s stable announced that it is now serving 150 million users and said that it will finally be turning its head towards advertising on the application.

In a blog post over the weekend, Instagram announced the 150 million landmark, revealing that 50 million users joined its fold only over the last six months. Notably, the past few months that have seen a torrent of users joining Instagram comes after the application was added with the ability to shoot videos.

Ads coming soon

Following closely on the heels of this announcement, Instagram has confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that it is moving towards monetising the service. Ads could be a part of your Instagram feed as soon as next year, according to reports. Emily White, Instagram’s Director of Business Operations has said to WSJ that the challenging factor for her and her team was to figure out a way ads could be inculcated within the app’s ecosystem without jeopardising its “cool factor”.

“We want to make money in the long term, but we don’t have any short-term pressure,” White said. The company does risk alienating a huge chunk of its user base with the decision to turn to ads. From the time Facebook took over Instagram, it has been inevitable that Zuckerberg and co. think up ways to turn Instagram into a profit making venture. It is, after all, one of the most used social networking services in the world, beating the likes of Twitter-owned Vine in the process.

Plans to monetise Instagram have been doing the rounds since the past few months now. The plans were more or less confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg in July himself, as he spoke about Instagram during the second-quarter results of Facebook. “Kevin has always been clear that we’re building Instagram to be a business. We expect over time to generate a lot of profit from it, and that will probably be through advertising,” he had said back then, talking about Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom.

For those of you wondering what Instagram is considering for its ad plans right now, here’s a piece of tit-bit; White is looking at possibilities around the Discover feature of the application that allows users to look up popular content. Some retailers, according to White, are interested in ad products that will allow users to click on pictures of products that link to a retailer’s own site. One thing is certain, though, Instagram will be learning from Facebook’s ad mistakes. It will look to avoid the mistakes made by the parent company in order to have a non-intrusive, yet informative ad process within the application.