It was just a regular Wednesday night, I was lying in bed scrolling through Instagram before going to sleep. Except this time I noticed something I had never noticed before, a post with the words “Sponsored” beside it. As a marketing student, all of a sudden my interest peaked and I had to look closer.

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It was a post by Instagram, detailing their plans to begin advertising in Canada with a slow roll out. This was essentially their warning to users of what was to begin over the next few weeks. I was intrigued but at the same time wondered how much of a purpose this would serve a business. If you think about it you remember that Instagram does not allow you to click links in your descriptions so there would be no way to directly send consumers to your website. Furthermore there would really be no easy way to measure the performance of these ads other than how many likes or comments you got on a picture but even with this it does not show you how many new customers you have actually gained as a business. The more I thought about it the more I thought this was not going to go well. It may not be a bad idea for businesses that have a very visual aspect to their company and they could show off their company on Instagram so I thought maybe it was not a bad idea for some companies but it would vary company to company. At this point I thought why not take a look to see what Instagram users are saying since there were over 5000 comments.

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Simply put, users were NOT happy at all. Instagram was one of the last remaining social media platforms without any advertisements. As a business student I knew this was going to happen eventually (even if they had not been bought by Facebook they would have needed to start making money eventually) but I did not think the response would be this negative. I read over 100 comments and noticed I could not find a single positive comments. The screenshot posted above is actually some of the nicest/cleanest comments written by users. What does this mean for E-Marketers? Do not be eager to jump on the Instagram Advertising bandwagon. If history is any indication eventually users will calm down and begin to embrace the Ads as they have with other platforms but for the time being, they are not happy and may take their anger at Instagram and Facebook out on your business instead.