Instagram Ads Start Next Week And This Is What They’ll Look Like In Your Feed

Because no social media service can ever stay ad-free forever, the inevitable is upon us: Instagram will start rolling out ads next week in paid posts. But Instagram is trying to be gentle, well, at least at first.

Sponsored ads will start popping into your feed next week but they’ll be limited to certain brands, Instagram writes in a blog post about the coming changes. The example ad is designated as a paid post by the “Sponsored” in the upper right hand corner, but at first glance the photo doesn’t seem that out of place among other Instagram photos you might see from whoever you follow.

Example shown is an ad for Instagram itself.

Example shown is an ad for Instagram itself.

Users can scroll right past the ads or if they’re really bugging you, you can notify Instagram that you don’t want anymore of that kind of ad. That’s similar to how sponsored posts already work on Facebook, Instagram’s parent company.

We want ads to be creative and engaging, so we’re starting with just a handful of brands that are already great members of the Instagram community. If you see an ad that doesn’t interest you, you can tap the “…” below it to hide it and provide feedback about what you didn’t like. This will help us show you more interesting ads in the future.

Those brands include adidas, Ben & Jerry’s, Burberry, General Electric, Lexus, Levi’s, Macy’s, Michael Kors, PayPal and Starwood.

As with Facebook, Instagram says it will use information about what you do on both Instagram and Facebook to figure out which ads to show you, which means it’s lokoing at the people you follow and which photos and videos you like, your interests and other profile information.

Even if you don’t have a Facebook account, you’ll still see ads. Unless you’re under 18 — while you only have to be 13 to have an Instagram account, no minors will see ads.

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