With the Twittersphere abuzz with furious and concerned Instagram users debating whether the world’s leading photo-sharing service is indeed ‘selling them out’ by making money from the images that they upload to their accounts, it seems to be about time that we faced a cold, hard truth: Instagram has always made money from your photographs. This is the way that the business works and if they did not make any money from them, well, you’d have to find a different app that has a bunch of cool filters for free (Hipstamatic is currently being sold at $1.99, which is almost two dollars more than Instagram, FYI).
Problems arise when people start to ask exactly how the company is making money from their photos and make knee-jerk assumptions that lead to the salient points of the matter getting swallowed up in a hurricane of hyperbole, a tsunami of subterfuge, an earthquake of…(well, you get the idea), without any good reason.
Let’s step back from the current issue of whether Instagram is selling your cute pet photos to self-promoting taxidermists, or whatever it is that has got the typical Instagram user so upset, and look at the company’s raison d’être: it allows users to share their photographs with their followers. Given that your (and the rest of the 29,999,999 users’) daily-uploaded photographs are what make the business grow and grow, they serve as its currency and the chips with which it can barter.
Like any business, Instagram has to make money to support itself and progress, which is why when Mark Zuckerberg flicked a billion-dollar note across the table to Kevin Systrom to secure Facebook’s biggest acquisition to date, some people expected ads to start flicking up in our Instagram feeds, à la Facebook’s own feed. Nobody seemed to be too worried about this as they only saw it as a potential annoyance that was worth the hassle; however, when it emerged that Instagram were (apparently) going to use the photographs to give to advertisers, all hell broke loose. The fact that Instagram have always and continue to plan to sell your photos to advertisers escaped the general hubbub of self-righteous protesters.
If you are a bald man and an advert for spray-on hair appears in your feed or next to a photograph that you upload, do you think that this is intriguing serendipity, patronising fate or perhaps just canny advertising research? Like Google, Facebook, Hotmail and pretty much any putatively ‘free’ online business where users receive a service without paying for it, Instagram allows advertisers to target their users with ‘informed advertising’ based on the knowledge that that they have of that user. Given that Instagram’s ‘currency’ is your personal photographs, then that is pretty much all they have to go on to make money. So when they place an advert next to a photograph of yours, it is the same as Facebook placing an ad for Budweiser next to a party-themed ‘profile update’ or Gmail plastering an ad for cheap flights on the top of your travel plan email chain, which nobody really seems to object to. The element that has got everybody so up in arms is the fact that Instagram is a photo-based service and somehow this is more of an infringement on their right to privacy…hmmm, well, if you are that worried about protecting your photographs, I would spend more time screening your followers (who could be anybody and can screenshot and download your photos), than whether RyanAir is going to put an ad next to your beach volleyball photograph.
The crux of the matter is that, yes, while Instagram is making money from the use of your photographs, this is absolutely nothing new and, when you think about it, pretty much essential for the business to actually exist in the first place. With the furore that has surrounded this issue, Instagram’s legal team is under increased pressure to make it clear to the everyday user that they will not be hawking their images to the highest bidder but in fact simply following the tried and tested formula of sponsored posts, features and adverts that will target users’ specific interests.
One way in which you can actually make money from your own Instagram photos is by signing up to Inkifi, a unique Instagram photo printing service that allows users to sell their art to other customers on the site. By uploading your favourite photos to a gallery, visitors to the site can browse through the collection of images and then choose to purchase them on an impressive range of canvas prints, acrylic prints and framed prints. And once your picture is on a customer’s wall, there won’t be a single advert in sight…
This article was originally published on Inkifi, a unique website that allows users to print their Instagram photos onto a variety of canvases, frames and greeting cards; users can also sell their art via the website.
