Читать книгу Instagram - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 21

When Facebook purchased Instagram for US$1 billion, it is worth remembering that at that time Instagram had not made a single cent in profit. The platform was very popular and growing rapidly, but there was no existing business model in place. While Facebook clearly had their eye on monetization from the beginning, Instagram only began experimenting with official advertisements in October 2013, and then only in the United States. Every advertisement featured a prominent ‘Sponsored’ notification (as official advertisements still do), but were relatively rare in the main feed. While the platform was slow and careful in rolling out advertising more widely, by September 2015 the Instagram advertising tools were made available to anyone who wanted to use them, for advertising across the entire platform. As Instagram became more and more popular for advertisers, the number of paid messages in the main feed reached as high as one in four or five, but the gradual roll out meant that people became acclimatized slowly to the change, and no significant resistance or protest was registered. As Instagram Stories increased in popularity, specific advertising tools were released for Stories, with Shopping Stickers rolling out in 2018, as well as direct sales links also in 2018, allowing Instagram users to make purchases without leaving the platform at all.

Somewhat more controversially, though, Instagram also became home for a less official economy in the form of sponsored, promoted and paid messages delivered by Influencers. While the Influencer economy is explored in far more detail in chapter 4, it is still worth noting that the difficulty in balancing communication with commerce is most evident when examining Influencer practices. Initially, Influencers rarely declared when their content was paid sponsorship, which led to a range of controversies. In most cases, national advertising standards were unclear as to whether existing rules required Influencers to declare when posts were paid advertising, but over the last few years these rules have tightened significantly. In June 2017 Instagram tried to defuse this tension by giving Influencers (and all business accounts) a tool to declare that specific posts were ‘Paid Partnership With’ the specific brand or company. While this and other changes are important, finding the right balance between official advertising, the economy of Influencers, and a platform premised on authentic sharing and personal communication, remains an ongoing challenge.