It’s pretty well-known that Mark Zuckerberg and his minions working over at Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty obsessed with ads. After all, how else are they meant to land themselves that fat ad-provided check? Now, because having ads show up as regular posts on Instagram wasn’t enough, Reels will start showing ads too.

More ads? Reel-y, Instagram?

Reels is Instagram’s take on the massively popular social media platform Tiktok. They’re short form videos that users can decorate with filters, stickers, music, and so on. It’s not copying, it’s inspiration.

Now, as you scroll through reels for hours on end, you’ll be interrupted by up to 30 second long ads. They’ll pop up if you’re viewing Reels in full-screen mode. They’ll look and behave like other posts, meaning you can comment, like, and share them if you really want to. There’s something creepy about ads acting like normal people’s posts… didn’t South Park do something about that?

Minor as it is, it’s still an annoyance, and one that points to Instagram’s (and by extension Facebook’s) recently more aggressive foray into monetising its service. A few months back it moved the explore icon and replaced it with a shopping menu, and in the wake of Facebook’s waking privacy policy nightmare it released a prompt to scare users into opting in to ad-tracking to keep Instagram a free service. What’s next? A premium subscription model that removes ads from your feed for a monthly charge? Please, that only sounds slightly inevitable.

Source: The Next Web