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Believe it or not, Instagram is now testing unskippable ads. Meta is seemingly looking to boost its profits, and this could be one way of doing so. The largest chunk of the company’s profits comes from ads, that’s not a secret.
Unskippable ads are being tested by Instagram
A few Instagram users noticed that unskippable ads are being tested. The company is showing ‘ad breaks’ while affected users are scrolling through the app. They last a few seconds, and you cannot skip them. Think of them as ads that interrupt your YouTube videos, if you’re not a Premium subscriber, of course.
You are basically forced to watch those ads before moving on down the feed. Dan Levy was one of the users that is affected by this test. He called it a “bonkers move” by the company. That’s not surprising, as this will make ads way more intrusive.
If you go to this post on Reddit, you’ll notice that a bunch of other users are affected by this test too. We’re still not sure if it will roll out to everyone, though. For the time being, it’s only in testing.
This does not guarantee such ads will become a standard
A Meta spokesperson had more to say on the matter. A statement was issued to TechCrunch. It was said that the company is always “testing formats that can drive value for advertisers”. We were also promised to get updates if such tests end up resulting in “any formal product changes”.
So, we could still avoid unskippable ads. Meta will surely receive a lot of negative feedback regarding this, though that may not prevent the company from implementing such ads, of course. It didn’t stop Google from doing the same in YouTube. We used to have one short ad break, now there are a bunch of them.
It is quite possible Instagram will get a paid model similar to YouTube Premium so that ads end up being avoidable. Well, if Instagram ends up rolling out unskippable ads to everyone, of course. In fact, Meta could end up offering some sort of payment system for several of its services in one. We’ll see, I’m only sharing some possible outcomes aka guessing.