Instagram’s Push into Video

This week, Facebook unveiled it will begin to let people share short videos through Instagram.  Video is a move that makes sense – and should serve as a very sticky complement to Instagram’s highly popular photo sharing platform.  Instagram’s offering of video seems to be a competitive response to the ever rising popularity of video-sharing services, like Twitter’s Vine.  Vine quickly gained favor among Twitter users since going live in January.

Following Twitter’s debute of an Android version of Vine in June, usage surged with Vine videos surpassing Instagram photos on Twitter and Vine’s momentum has continued.  However, while on the surface, offering video looks like a great way to drive increased traffic to Instagram, there very well could be another, perhaps even more compelling reason for adding video: it’s a well-known, trusted medium for advertisers and marketers. Also, with 100+ million users and growing, there is certainly enough scale create and monetize a video ad program.

Instagram is not running any ads yet and actually got a lot of heat with users over changes in its terms of advertising services.  Further, Mark Zuckerberg made a point of noting that while demand for advertising is there, for now there are no plans to capitalize on it.  Despite all of this, like so many other apps that have captivated us in the past and subsequently succumbed to distracting advertising programs  – Pandora, Facebook, Songza, The Next Move by UrbanDaddy, to name a few – I would suggest Instagram will fall victim as well.  But – one can be sure – there will be a great app behind it without advertising….for now at least.