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Instagram Ads Now Include Mobile Banners (adweek.com) 37

Posted by msmash from the ads,-ads-everywhere dept.
More ads are coming to Instagram. The Facebook-owned photo and video sharing network has begun rolling out a feature that links ads to profile pages. When someone clicks on a profile, for instance, they will see a banner at the bottom, reports AdWeek. The banner prompts the user to either visit a website or download an app. From the report: According to an Instagram rep, so-called "profile taps" will be included in click reporting for advertisers and are rolling out internationally. In a statement, Instagram said, "We found that Instagrammers were routinely tapping on a company's name from a direct response ad to learn more. Now when that happens, the call-to-action button from that same ad extends to the company's profile page to make it easier for people to discover a business they care about."
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Instagram Ads Now Include Mobile Banners More

Instagram Ads Now Include Mobile Banners

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  • Yay! More advertising! (Score:3)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @12:44PM (#52316017) Journal

    Yay! More advertising, lucky us! Yippee, whoo hoo, lets all celebrate!

  • Advertising doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @12:47PM (#52316049)
    Dirty little secret that can break all these social media companies is that advertising doesn't work on their platforms. Not even 0.02% work that is traditionally cited for search. At this point people are so trained to ignore these, that you might as well not bother. So more of the same would only get ignored more.
    • True, having been "on the net" since early 90s, I ignore ads completely, my brain does not see them. If there is a huge popup blocking everything I might disable it if I really want to read the article, else I just close the window, same for article divided into 10 pages.

      The only ads I clicked in 25 years was a few times on /. to support them.

      And I do not have Instagram ;-)

      • I'm convinced that most or all of the clicks that popups claim are accidental, when people are trying to hit the close button.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sinij ( 911942 )
          Anecdote. For my b2b service advertising using Google AdWords when I restricted to non-mobile devices I cut my clicks by 100 times but improved interaction stats by nearly as much. That is, my theory that mobile was nearly all accidental clicks was empirically proven to be true. This is search-only on keywords, I could only imagine kinds of junk you'd get in other circumstances.
          • what % actually bough a product and service and would any other number really mean anything knowing most are accidentally clicks?

    • 0.02% out of how many millions? I'll play those odds

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )

        0.02% out of how many millions? I'll play those odds

        This is pretty much the underlying assumption of all marketing, thing is - there is no research backing up any of these. There are some number for in-line topic-relevant search results, but there is no numbers for social media and in-app banners. It could be 2*10^-18 for all we know and you can't make these odds work.

        • Yeah, it's a gamble, but considering how little effort it takes and the low cost, why not try to make some mad money on the side? I will grant that the market is saturated right now. Just gotta come up with a new gimmick to reel in the suckers...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sinij ( 911942 )

            Yeah, it's a gamble

            At this point you are into lottery-jackpot odds.

            Just gotta come up with a new gimmick to reel in the suckers..

            This is how you got to these shitty odds in the first place. People willing to punch only so many monkeys before you are mentally or technologically ignored.

            • Well, it's not me personally, but somebody out there is deciding it's worth it, even if it's just a way washing money that can be written off. If the business was such a miserable failure, you wouldn't see so much of it.

  • You get what you pay for... I don't use Instagram. Tried it a long time ago and didn't feel the need to share my pictures. Don't use Facebook app either, but I am not a very social person.

  • No. Easier to pick up a virus..

    :-) Does android have a hosts file?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sirber ( 891722 )
      yes it does, but you need root access to modify it. else you can use a "local vpn" to block ads, but it slows a bit the phone.
  • "We found that Instagrammers were routinely tapping on a company's name from a direct response ad to learn more.

    Routinely? The word they are looking for is "inadvertently". No one deliberately clicks or taps an ad unless they've been tricked into doing so.

    The desperation to justify their existence is comical.

  • Translation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @01:04PM (#52316241)

    In a statement, Instagram said, "We found that Instagrammers were routinely tapping on a company's name from a direct response ad to learn more."

    Or, you know, users routinely click these ads by accident because they take up about a quarter of the screen (at least), or when trying to hit the tiny X button that is about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

  • to state the obvious but not much mentioned fact, most of what are called tech companies are nothing more than ad pushers.
    everything else is secondary.
    all their tech and other hypes, and constant need to keep high media profile, is driven by that need to push ads through higher usage. that is why even most of the stories that appear here in slashdot about them are lacking in substance and highly exaggerated.

    as market saturates they will push to the limit of ad tolerance of the users they have.

    it is about ti

    • What if I started a Facebook/Instagram type site with no ads, and with decent spam control, and charged $1/year for a subscription, paid for through Paypal or Amazon and accepting Visa Prepaid?

      • Then you would go out of business. No one is going to pay for something that is "free". The money that drives these sites are the ad companies which are desperate to push their ads that everyone ignores.

        • Really, there's no need for intelligent users to pay even $1, when there are more than enough idiots clicking ads to make the whole thing free.

          Same reason they don't charge admission to a casino.

        • So people complaining about ads just want something to complain about, even though they apparently benefit? (From an economic standpoint, I think the advertisements drain more resources than alternatives, and people would be wealthier paying to use web sites than buying products that roll in a $50 billion ad budget; that requires a greater depth of thinking than I estimate most exercise.)
      • I would allow text ads or fill out a poll and no, decent spam controls isn't good enough that can be gotten everywhere.

        • In the context of a pay-per-account service, decent spam control tends to evolve into "your e-mail/ip is blocked and you have to pay another dollar", and eventually into "your spam activity only ever reaches ~5-50 users, and you need ~20,000 per $1 cost to break even". Paywall spam filters are efficient because spammers rely on a model of spending hundreds of dollars to innundate hundreds of millions of users, and you can easily turn that cost into millions of dollars for the same volume exposure if your

  • I don't get it. Who cares? Don't all those apps have banners/ads/etc loaded with malware already?

  • I still have the old brown-and-tan icon. I won't update it until this one stops working - which I am sure will be soon, since they now have financial incentive to get people on the new app.

  • Isn't it great how corporations have their own language? Apparently the correct English translation of, "to make it easier for people to discover a business they care about," is, "so we can sell more ads and make more money."

    Will they ever figure out that no one is fooled by this BS? So you want to make money. Fine. I get that, and I don't have a problem with it. But please please please stop lying to us about everything you do! You don't have to pretend you're doing it for our good. Just say you're

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