Instagram will now show twice as many adverts - here's why

As the world’s most popular photo-sharing app, it’s no surprise that Instagram is worth a serious amount of money to companies who want to advertise.

But the near-constant presence of sponsored posts and paid-for adverts interrupting the stream of your friends’ holiday photos can be very annoying.

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And now it is about to get worse, according to experts at The Information.

Instagram has been asked by its owners at Facebook to double the number of adverts it shows to users in a bid to increase revenue.

Adverts will increase revenue for Facebook

This demand ties in with the recent announcement that adverts would be placed on the Instagram Explore section of the app.

Explore uses algorithms to show you photos from accounts you are not following that it thinks you may be interested in.

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Instagram announced: “Today, 80% of people follow a business on Instagram, and Explore can help them find the next business or product that they might love. Brands are an important part of the Instagram experience for people.

“Whether it's shopping, catching up on stories or discovering the latest trends, we see people actively looking to connect with brands they like.

“That's why, over the next few months, we'll be introducing ads in Explore feed.”

The boost in advertisements also includes those that are placed across platforms owned by Facebook, and so they’ll appear on multiple sites and apps.

Part of a wider project to ‘integrate’ apps

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Earlier this year, it was announced that Instagram and Whatsapp, which are both owned by Facebook, would have their names changed to make their association with the social media platform clearer.

The two apps will soon be known as ‘WhatsApp from Facebook’ and ‘Instagram from Facebook’.

According to The Information, the idea is to bring the different platforms under the Facebook banner.

It was also reported in January that the different platforms are likely to be further integrated through the merging of chats and messaging so that users can pass seamlessly between the apps.

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Facebook has said that this will make it ‘clearer’ that the different platforms are all part of the same company.

However, the merging of the apps does pose questions for security, as different platforms varying amounts of personal information to set up an account.

While Whatsapp only uses a mobile phone number, Facebook requires far more information about a person.

Writing in a blog post, Mark Zuckerberg aimed to assure users that the integration of the apps would not pose a security threat and called the project a “privacy-focused social network”.

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He wrote: “People want to be able to choose which service they use to communicate with people,’ he wrote in a blog post.

“However, today if you want to message people on Facebook you have to use Messenger, on Instagram you have to use Direct, and on WhatsApp you have to use WhatsApp.

“We want to give people a choice so they can reach their friends across these networks from whichever app they prefer.”