Remember when the apps that harvested user data for advertising purposes were free? Yeah, Instagram Plus is hoping to change all that by convincing users to pay to have their data harvested for advertising purposes.
Okay, fine, you’ll get a few other features non-paying users won’t have. But, as far as we can make out, handing over a monthly subscription won’t stop Meta from turning your clicks, views, preferences, and other things into ad sales. Good thing the new paid tier of Instagram is only in the testing phase in the Philippines.
Instagram Plus… what?
At least, that’s according to one Matt Navarra, who has screenshots of the apparent service ‘upgrade’ over on Threads. The existence of Instagram Plus was later confirmed by a Meta spokesperson. According to the company, “a few [unspecified] countries” are seeing the subscription service being trialled in their respective regions. At least pricing, as far as is known, isn’t awful.
A Plus subscription seems to give users the ability to create various Stories audiences for targeted reach. It also provides extra data on Stories rewatches, extends when Stories expire, and lets subscribers view said sections on other accounts without showing up as a view. That’s good for Instagram corporate spying, we suppose? There are other features, too. Whether they’re worth twenty bucks a month is probably up to the user.
It’s not like there hasn’t been talk of an Instagram subscription for five years or more. Earlier this year, a paid version of Meta’s WhatsApp was also outed. But, circling back to that bit about data harvesting, it’s unlikely that handing over money for new features will stop the company from using its standard tactics of turning clicks into advertising data.
In other words, users of these (and other) platforms will still be milked for everything they’ve got. They’ll just have to pay for it now. It’ll pay off for Meta, too. If Instagram Plus keeps its current pricing, goes global, and every one of Instagram’s three billion users pays up, the social media giant will make approximately R60 billion ($3.5 billion) a month. Plus, they’ll still sell your data to advertisers. Sounds very… lucrative.
