Instagram’s 150 million active users may not be the only ones frustrated to learn that Facebook’s popular app is preparing to add advertising. Since adding video earlier this year, Instagram has significantly expanded the load on mobile networks, and it is a fair bet that some of its ads will also be video-based.
Video came to Instragram in June, and many mobile operators immediately noticed the impact on their networks. “That literally became, almost overnight, the number one source of video traffic on the Internet, surpassing even YouTube,” noted Bruce Miller of Xirrus, which provides Wi-Fi offload solutions for carriers. Instagram limits the length of its videos to 15 seconds. Twitter’s Vine, an Instagram competitor, limits videos to 6 seconds.
“In the last few months Vine and Instagram … have come out of nowhere with video,” said Jeff Glueck, CEO of cloud-based video optimization provider Skyfire. “Already in just a matter of months they are eating up about half of the bandwidth between them that YouTube had built over years and years … and the reason they’re doing that is each time you open those apps they are downloading ten almost HD quality videos to auto play.”
Instagram said it will be ready to start selling ads within a year, so mobile network capacity and efficiency should both increase by the time the ads actually appear. And of course it is possible that Instagram’s advertisers will choose pictures or text over video. But Instagram is reportedly talking to brands like Ford and Coca-Cola, both of whom are already posting video ads on YouTube.
Follow me on Twitter.
