Popular photo sharing app Instagram has recently announced that it plans to start showing a number of adverts within its ‘Stories’ feature.
The Stories feature is the platform’s answer to Snapchat’s feature of the same name. It is, essentially, a slideshow of videos and photos that appear at the top of the app’s news feed. The ream of photos are edited using the tool’s famous filters before they are posted to the storyboard, with this content then disappearing after 24 hours. A user can also choose to remove a post before this timeframe comes to an end.
The adverts will be full screen, and will appear as regular posts in between the stories posted by those a user follows. Just like with regular story content, users will have the ability to skip past them by simply touching/clicking the screen as soon as it appears. This will then take them onto the next story.
Instagram revealed statistics relating to the feature, stating that around 150 million users now post to the story feature on a daily basis. This is a similar number to those that use the equivalent feature on rival photo platform, Snapchat, which announced its figures back in August 2016.
This represents the first time that adverts will be added to the story feature, following in the footsteps of the main timeline of the app which contains a number of sponsored posts from advertisers and publishers.
These adverts will be marked with a small “Sponsored” tag as they are in the main timeline to indicate they are different to the regular stories a user is skipping through – just in case they don’t notice it in the first place. These adverts will be a mixture of photos, with a duration of five seconds, and videos lasting up to 15 seconds.
They will appear during the transition of one story to the next as opposed to being placed in between individual posts, like they do on the main platform. It is believed that these ads are designed to reach out rather than to drive sales, as they will not have links to the advertiser’s websites within them.
Adverts will be coming to Instagram stories as early as this week in the UK, and will include ads from worldwide brands such as Asos and Universal.
Instagram is owned by social networking giant, Facebook which also announced changes relating to advertising recently, with the site planning on introducing ads in the middle of videos posted to the network.
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[…] timelines. At the turn of the year, the company announced that it intended to add adverts to its Stories feature, and this has now been […]