0 comments
Meta is officially trialling premier subscriptions for Instagram. Those staying on the free version are already being bombarded with ads, and many say the standard experience is being deliberately degraded.
Thousands of us looking to procrastinate on Instagram this morning were halted by a new paid sign-up page.
The vast majority of us who steered clear of the ‘ad-free’ tier, given Instagram has been sponsor and ad heavy in recent years anyway, are now taking part in a trial to see how heavily the platform can bombard us with ads before we succumb. The alternative is a monthly fee of £2.99.
Instagram’s core services remain free to use, but you can now expect ads to appear within every few posts on your timeline or reels. The new integration is anything but subtle, making roughly a third of screen time on the app dedicated to ads.
Meta is positioning the subscription as an optional layer rather than a requirement, but the overnight flooding of feeds appears both overzealous and intrusive. Given the drastic nature of the shift, Meta is clearly willing to risk driving users away. But what is the actual objective here?
Comment
byu/tylerthe-theatre from discussion
intechnology
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Meta needs to find a foolproof way to avoid being penalised for further privacy mishaps. UK and EU regulators have already squeezed billions out of the conglomerate for breaches related to data processing, targeted advertising, and transparency failures over the last decade.
By bottlenecking users into a ‘consent or pay’ model – which has the terms of its data collecting concealed in blocks of small print – it has technically complied with the need to be transparent about how its targeted ads work.
Meta is also willingly spending billions on AI infrastructure, metaverse projects (why?), and data centres, while investors are watching closely to see whether those bets pay off. Subscriptions offer a predictable revenue stream that is not tied entirely to advertising, which has become more volatile after Apple’s privacy changes of 2022 and shifting advertiser demand.
While Meta may have a play to get regulators off its back, however, critics of the two-tier Instagram model say that a paywall has effectively been put around privacy while the free in-app experience is deliberately being degraded.
Public reticence to the change is already palpable, and plenty of Instagram users are saying this is the final straw that will push them to delete their profiles – should Meta introduce the system permanently.
