Ad placements to roll out extremely slowly, be 'beautiful and high quality'
Taking to its official blog to announce the news, Instagram laid out its plan to introduce advertisements into the social photo and video service. It was only a matter of time before Instagram (now owned by Facebook) had to monetize its 150 million users, but it plans to start things off slowly at least. In the coming months, users will start to see both photos and videos in their feed from brands that they don't follow.
The advertisements will be "a small number of beautiful, high-quality photos and videos from a handful of brands that are already great members of the Instagram community," the post claims. Given Instagram's artistic ethos this is probably the best way to go about it — give us something we may want to see already, and we won't complain.