Instagram is opening up Stories to all advertisers in a bid to capitalize on the success of the feature.
Having started testing ads with a select amount of partners in January — including Buick, Nike, Netflix, and Airbnb, among others — the company is now allowing businesses of all sizes to jump on the bandwagon.
What this essentially means for Instagram users is more ad breaks popping up between Stories, which are viewed in a constant stream on the photo-sharing app. The full-screen ads will last anywhere between five seconds for images and 15 seconds for video. Each promotional message will carry a “sponsored” label at the bottom, to ensure you don’t mistake it for user-generated content. Fortunately, Instagram gives its members the ability to skip ads by simply swiping on the screen (so get those fingers at the ready).
For the uninitiated, Stories are temporal slideshows comprised of images and videos shared within the span of 24 hours. Launched in August, the feature racked up an impressive 150 million daily view count in the span of just five months.
Upon the test launch of ads for Stories, Instagram revealed that 70 percent of its 600 million users follow a business and that one-third of the most viewed Stories are from businesses. It also claimed that roughly 70 percent of stories are being watched with the sound on. Overall, the statistics indicated that Stories were ripe for advertising, with brands such as fashion label Mulberry boasting an increase in site engagement from swipable links in Stories.
As a result of the expansion, businesses will be able to create ads for Instagram Stories and track their reach, impressions, replies and exits (marketing speak for how many users either watch or interact with them) using Facebook’s ad manager tool.
Instagram’s ads expansion follows in the footsteps of its parent company Facebook. The big, blue social network also announced its plans to test midroll ads within videos in January. The move is a way for Facebook (and publishers) to generate revenue from videos, which the company claims will make up 70 percent of all traffic on its platform by 2021.
Users worried that the changes may affect the viewing experience on Facebook and Instagram should keep in mind that pre- and mid-roll ads are ubiquitous. Both YouTube and Twitter utilize them in one form or another, and Snapchat began inserting skippable ads between Stories last year.
Instagram has not specified how much it intends to pocket from the promotional content, although Facebook is thought to be keeping 45 percent of ad sales (the same deal offered by YouTube).
Updated 03-02-2017 by Saqib Shah: Added info of general rollout of ads for Instagram Stories.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?