back to article Facebook-owned Instagram morphs into messaging service to please admen

Facebook needs to turn Instagram into a money-making concern. Ads will shortly be knitted into the service, and - in preparation for that - the photo-sharing site has debuted a new messaging feature called Direct. It's keen to get more of its 150 million users to engage with each other and hang around longer on Instagram. To …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ads, Ads and yet more [redacted] ads

    Does everything in this world have to be covered in Adverts?

    Dear Mr/Ms Admen,

    You can take your ads and stuff them up somewhere nasty. You really don't understand the law od diminishing returns do you?

    Yours,

    Grumpy Old man, who goes out of his way NOT to buy things that have been advertised.

    1. JDX Gold badge

      Re: Ads, Ads and yet more [redacted] ads

      Sure - as soon as people want to start paying for services rather than expecting them to be free.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ads, Ads and yet more [redacted] ads

      The funniest thing is the vast gulf between the way 'we' (the punters/victims) and the ad pimps talk about the joys of 'ads for content' raj. In most public or private discussion and virtually every survey without a vested interest, a substantial and growing majority users detest them in virtually all their forms, with the possible exception of small google type text ads. They're more tolerant of TV ads, perhaps because they don't send data back to daddy and/or they can make a coffee/fast forward, and print ads, but the rest are despised, personalised ads online more so in some ways,perhaps because they're easier to notice.

      As a practical example, take the Tunein Radio app for iOS etc. Previously it had massive numbers of very high ratings close to five stars. Latest update reduces the price but forces ads even on the paid version for new purchases; existing purchasers were supposed to remain ad-free, but many apparently haven't. Result is reams of new reviews virtually unanimously in complaint and reducing the rating to one star. Admittedly this is asmuch about paying AND getting ads, but I don't see many appreciating the useful service ads provide.

      Yet pop along to one of the marketing or ad industry sites or print publications (or surveys commissioned by the industry) and you'd think you'd jumped a few space-time dimensions to a completely different reality where the punters were delighted with the 'ads for drivel' pact and really did swallow the 'exciting', 'useful' and 'relevant' stuff the industry loves to bandy about. Their survey results and 'insights' into consumer behaviour from tracking etc seem to be treated as gospel truth fuelled by consumers delighted to feed them honest opinions when asked and delighting in being informed of new products and discounts.

      It might be my wishful thinking, but I suspect the day is rapidly approaching when these two mutually excluding realities are going to meet violently head on, with profound consequences for some of the super-inflated share prices we currently have.

    3. Euripides Pants
      Trollface

      Re: Ads, Ads and yet more [redacted] ads

      "Does everything in this world have to be covered in Adverts?"

      This complaint brought to you by AdVerse Reactions, Inc.

      Folks tell us our rhyming ads stink

      They don't like our tweets

      No matter how sweet

      Perhaps we should switch to

      Haiku

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Ads, Ads and yet more [redacted] ads

        Your scansion, sadly, sucks. It's no defence to play the humour card. When writing verse both form and rhythm must align to sense. Though rhyme and scansion may invite a curse it should be from the author. I would deem a failed attempt at scansion rather worse than blank verse. Writing in a formal schema at least can help at focussing the brain (my favoured form, like this, is terza rima)

        1. AndyS

          Re: Ads, Ads and yet more [redacted] ads

          Line breaks are essential

          To the flow of a poem

          Without them it's mental

          Trying to find your way home.

          I've rearranged your attempt a bit

          Sort of polished the chrome

          To give it more of a hit.

          Like a hip-hop rhyme

          It's more of a chore

          But bro, you gotta take your time

          Else you're gonna hit the floor.

          ------

          Your scansion, sadly, sucks. It's no defence

          to play the humour card. When writing verse

          both form and rhythm must align to sense.

          Though rhyme and scansion may invite a curse

          it should be from the author. I would deem a

          failed attempt at scansion rather worse than blank verse.

          Writing in a formal schema

          at least can help at focussing the brain

          (my favoured form, like this, is terza rima)

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Ads, Ads and yet more [redacted] ads

            Perhaps I really ought not to complain that someone paid attention to my post, but terza rima drives on like a train (remember Deltic Diesels?), and though most verse forms can benefit from laying out to ease the understanding, I would boast much more if people missed that this was rhyme (though with a tiny readership, no doubt.)

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Ads, Ads and yet more [redacted] ads

            Actually it's

            failed attempt at scansion rather worse

            than blank verse. Writing in a formal schema[...]

            Still a load of bollocks,though.

  2. JDX Gold badge

    Snapchat spurned a $3bn buyout offer from Facebook.

    If this is true, then WHY? They think they are worth more?!!!

  3. phil dude
    Pint

    copyright...?

    Surely we all own the copyright to our faces...? Even signing away the right to a "photo", no company can own our likeness?

    Further on the comment about paying for things and ads, a few end cases can be considered.

    For example, cable television comes chock full of ads, even though you are paying.

    TV companies give us their content for "free" and then bombard us with ads. But not seeing ads is simple, especially when so many people no longer watching anything live... Myth/XBMC etc..

    Online content - I really don't know about this. I mean google is the online ad giant, but I must say I find them invisible. However, further down the food chain you have the sites from hell "waving, dancing CLICK ME!" which is all to often a means of site funding.

    Anyone know of a plugin to a browser which tells you which of the "side loaded" sites on a page is taking all the time? There was a jump in browser performance some years about when browser started rendering AQAP, leaving blank tiles. But many new websites take for ever loading from $RANDOM_CDN $GOOGLE_SERVICE etc...

    In summary, advertising, it would seem is pointless. Until it isn't...

    P.

    1. Graham Marsden

      @phil dude - Re: copyright...?

      > "Surely we all own the copyright to our faces...?"

      Nope, anyone can take your photograph in a public place and even re-use it there's nothing you can do about it. The only thing that they can't (or shouldn't) do is to post something defamatory in relation to the picture because that's libel, but even then you'd have to sue them to get redress.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: @phil dude - copyright...?

        Actually, posting any information about the victim, libellous or not, could result in a charge under the Data Protection Act, as you would be holding personally identifiable data. Also, the law is different outside the UK, with some countries requiring permission to use identifiable pictures of people.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Where are these adverts?

    Do I need to adjust my privoxy / noscript settings in order to see them?

  5. chrisp1141

    This isn't going to help fb one bit. Teens aren't using fb anymore. Only old people are using it, which is interesting because they should know better. For some reason it is younger people who have a greater appreciation for privacy. Just look at the rise of SnapChat, Ravetree, WhatsApp, DuckDuckGo, etc. We are smart enough to know that facebook is just trying to collect as much personal information about us as they can.

    1. Kane
      Stop

      [citation needed]

    2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re : "Only old people are using it, which is interesting because they should know better"

      Sorry but bollocks. You're talking about the children of the 60's generation who saw computers invade their lives without them knowing either what they could do (the computers) or what they should do about it (the people).

      Everyone I know that talks about computers only talks about the one or two programs they know. Most of the time, it's Outlook and Word, plus maybe this one web site (obviously Facebook).

      They don't know computers, they manage to putter around in one or two programs. And as soon as something goes wrong, they're lost like a babe in the woods.

      Youngsters fare not much better, actually. The only difference is that they know 10 or more programs, and are much less reluctant at clicking here or there to find something out. Good on them, but they still don't know about computers, they just barely know how to use them.

      It's not going to get better, by the way. Tablets and smartphones are placing the computer squarely in the consumer (aka idiot) space, meaning that soon, nobody will know what a backup even is, let alone how to go about doing it.

      At that point, I'm no longer telling anyone I'm a programmer. I'll tell them I work in a sewage treatment plant. That should ensure that I never get any questions about my job, or about computers.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Re : "Only old people are using it, which is interesting because they should know better"

        Oddly perhaps, one of the best bosses I ever had was of the view that computers should work exactly like sewage processing - dead simple user interface, highly reliable in use, and all the smelly stuff happens far away where it's supervised by experts.

        That was before the advertising industry got involved, of course.

  6. imanidiot Silver badge

    And thus another stroke

    of the saw Facebook is using to cut its own legs out from under it.

    FB is really hard at work finding the line between people staying because they don't care enough to leave and people fleeing to find ANY alternative. The problem is, once they cross it, they'll be doomed to ever diminishing returns until the company no longer exists or is sold no matter what they do after that.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: And thus another stroke

      Surely the real problem is the law of diminishing returns. In the US adverts can be longer than the programmes. The FB equivalent would be a tiny bit of content in the middle of adverts, because as the return diminishes the amount of advertising needed to run the system increases, but equally the system costs more to run because of the bandwidth needed to serve up the increasing number of adverts, thus requiring still more space to be taken up with them...

      I bet they're all envying Linkedin, which had subscriptions from the start.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ads are bullshit!

    You can waste millions of your shit Apple Ads, I still ain't buying last decades fad no matter what your ad says.

    Honestly, just who are the mugs who make a purchase after seeing an ad?

    Not me!

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