Instagram Gets Serious About Advertising, Opens Platforms to Advertisers: What Does This Mean For Users?

Instagram is taking steps to make its ads available to all types of business, not just a bunch of branch as it's right now, the company said on Tuesday.

From this month, the photo-sharing website is rolling out to advertisers the ability to more closely direct campaigns by zip code and other data sets like interests in the same was that brands can target consumers on its parent company, Facebook, Reuters reported.

The service will also let advertisers link to external websites or app stores with link like 'install now' or 'buy it' or 'learn more.'

As of now, Instagram is only allowing a bunch of brands, i.e., Levi's, Banana Republic and Ben & Jerry's. Advertisers can only target users by gender, age and country.

"The quality of the ad experience remains a very important point of differentiation for us," Instagram's global head of business and brand development James Quarles said in an interview.

Instagram has more than 200 million daily active users across the world hence the move to widen and sharpen the ad platform is a significant one.

"People are used to seeing beautiful brand imagery in their feeds," said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer. "Now they will see some direct response ads and we all know the baggage that comes with that."

Still, by opening up to all advertisers, including hundreds of thousands of small businesses, Instagram risks losing quality control of campaigns and potentially irking users, Reuters noted.