You Are About to See Even More Ads on Instagram

As Meta is struggling to revive its falling revenue in order to reverse its downward financial spiral, it is adding new ways for advertisers to clutter up your feeds. Specifically, the Explore feed and grids are about to start getting ads.

Spotted by Engadget, Meta has announced a set of changes to its advertising ecosystem that includes a bunch of adjustments to how brands can buy time in front of Instagram users including an update to Facebook Reels, adding ways to make campaigns more performant with artificial intelligence (AI), and introducing new ad placements and formats on Instagram.

Facebook Reels are getting new post-loop ads, which are four to 10-second skippable and standalone video ads that play after a reel has ended. Meta is also adding AI and automation to its Meta Advantage Suite which it says will help businesses learn and “unlock value” from their ad investments more quickly.

But the biggest change is coming to Instagram where it is adding ads to both the Explore tab and profile feed as well as AI-powered multi-advertiser ads.

Businesses can now place ads in Explore home, which is the grid that users see when they first arrive on the Explore tab. Meta says that is also beginning to test ads in profile feed.

“As a part of this test, we will experiment with a monetization opportunity that will allow eligible creators to earn extra income from ads displayed in their profile feeds, beginning with select U.S. creators,” the company says.

The AI-powered multi-advertiser ads is, in short, a way for Meta to put an advertisement onto an existing advertisement.

“When a person engages with an ad, we’ll deliver ads underneath that we think may be of interest, powered by machine learning. We’ve found that adding multi-advertiser contextual ads to existing Instagram feed ads campaigns outperformed running campaigns for the Purchase outcome compared to those that did not include multi-advertiser ads.”

Ads on top of ads feels like a parody, but Meta seems to think it will work.

Meta also says that it has launched an open beta test of augmented reality (AR) advertisements both Feed and Stories, where it will allow brands to encourage users to interact with their surroundings.

Meta has been struggling with not only dropping revenue but also dipping user engagement and a lackluster number of new users to its platforms. Historically, Instagram has been the lone exception to Meta’s wider user-based problem, but stacking the app with more ads in an already ad-filled experience seems like a risky move.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.