Guest Post
The rising users of Instagram Stories have now reached to the number of users on SnapChat. Along with the recent statistics of the new 150 million users, Instagram has announced the launch of ads mixed into stories. The 15-seconds video ads and the un-clickable five-second photo ads will appear between different people’s stories that can easily be avoided. Business accounts with analytics on the impressions, reach, replies, and the exit of their Stories, will all be provided by Instagram.
Just after its launch in August, monetizing of the feature seems a little early and can result in reducing the platform’s rapid growth. In October, it hit 100 million dailies due to the Stories appearing on the Instagram feed’s home screen rather than appearing on a separate tab or app. But now, Stories has the same user count as Instagram’s feed when it began showing ads in 2013. It almost took three years for Instagram to get 600 million monthly and 300 million users on daily basis.
These new Story ads will be first tested over the coming few weeks with a group of 30 partners including Capital One, Netflix, General Motors, and Nike. After these tests the Story ads will be rolled out on all levels globally.
The company is of the view that this group will create ads that will not bore people into closing the app. It is because seventy percent of the Instagram users already follow a business and one-third of the most-watched Stories on Instagram were also created by businesses. With the help of Insights button on their profiles, these users will be able to check analytics on their Stories.
As for now, Stories ads will be vended at a cost-per-1000-impressions basis. These will be priced at auction with any length of view counting as an impression rather than needing to play for three seconds so that they can be reckoned as a view. But presently there is no possibility for clicking or swiping up to open an advertiser’s website. But Instagram’s VP of business James Quarles indicated about incorporating a video buying by users in the coming months which will be measured differently.
Users will have to watch through multiple friends’ Stories in a sequence in order to see any sign of the ads. Instangram will slip in an ad when the app auto-advances from the end of one friend’s story to the start of another. The ad will have a sponsored label on it. These ads will be just like the posts that are posted by users and will either be in the form of a photo that will last up to five seconds or a video lasting up to 15 seconds. Users will be able either to swipe to skip the ad or will watch it till the end before it auto-advances to the next friend’s story.
Just like the Stories feature, this ad format is also similar to SnapChat’s Snap Ads. Everything works the same way; it’s just that a user on SnapChat has to select several people’s Stories to watch as a playlist. As SnapChat has stopped its users from viewing all the friend’s Stories in a sequence, the ads now appear in between the running playlists.
Later this year SnapChat was considered to IPO before showing ads and if Instagram would have waited till then for the launch it would have retained the advantage of offering Stories without interruption. But right now for Instagram any set back in usage caused by ads can be overcome by its Stories rapid growth. Also Facebook as the parent company wants to see more revenues from its photo acquisition.
Via: Tech Crunch
