Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions, has just confirmed that Instagram will be “monetized” in the near future. Everson said this in an interview with BusinessInsider during the Ignition 2012 conference. As of now, Facebook isn’t totally sure how it’ll handle monetizing the service, but we’re pretty sure it will be by way of advertisements within the application. Everson told BusinessInsider the following:
“Well, Instagram continues to grow incredibly fast and we’re still a very small team when you think about the amount of people they are reaching. There are many brands that use Instagram right now to try to get a feel for how to engage with their followers. We will definitely be figuring out a monetization strategy. When that will happen, I can’t comment, but it’s going to happen.”
Instagram has remained ad-free since launch as Burbn Inc, the company behind Instagram, was eating away at funding given by investors. Quite honestly, ads on Instagram won’t bother me too much. I use the service almost daily for free, so viewing a few ads every day to pay for the service isn’t really a huge deal.
