Ads are coming to your Insta Stories as Snapchat clone hits 150 million daily users

folarin okunola

January 17, 2017 10:40 AM

There will be easily skippable but unclickable 5-second photo and 15-second video ads that will appear between people's stories.

Instagram Stories Ads.

Instagram is quickly moving to monetize that large audience by announcing the launch of ads mixed into Stories. There will be easily skippable but unclickable 5-second photo and 15-second video ads that will appear between people's stories.

The Facebook-owned photo-sharing site will also provide business accounts with analytics on the impressions, reach and exits of their Stories.

Experts are already speculating that moving to monetize the feature just five months after it launched in August 2016 could be premature and potentially slow Instagram Stories' rapid growth.

ALSO READ: Photo-sharing apps' new feature is an exact clone of Snapchat Stories

The new Instagram Story ads will roll out globally eventually on all interfaces, but testing will be carried out first over the next few weeks with a group of about 30 partners.

Some of the partners include Capital One, General Motors, Nike and Netflix.

About 70% of Instagram users already follow a business, and a third of the most-watched Stories on Instagram were created by brands/businesses.

As at the time of writing this report, there is no option to click or swipe to open an advertisers website, but James Quarles, VP of business at Instagram, tells TechCrunch that “In the future people might want to buy a click or buy a video view and those would be measured differently… We plan to incorporate that in the coming months.”

Still, this format is a lot like Snapchat's Snap Ads. The only difference between the two is Snapchat users have to select several people's Stories to watch as a playlist, with ads appearing in between since you can no longer watch all of your friend's Stories' in sequence.

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