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Instagram massively increased the number of ads it shows in the last few months
(Ben and Jerrys)
Ben and Jerrys sponsor Instagram posts
If you use Instagram frequently, you will have probably already noticed a massive increase in the frequency of advertisements that nestle between your friends' selfies and plates of food.
But new data from Brand Networks has revealed the massive scale of this growth. Brand Networks is an ad network which handles social advertising for companies like American Express, AT&T, and ABInBev.
The total number of impressions on Instagram served via Brand Networks in August 2015 was 50 million. In September that doubled to 100 million. But, by December 2015, the figure was 670 million. That's more than a 13 times increase.
And Brand Networks does not think that this rise is over. The a network predicts that it will deliver more than 1 billion Instagram ad impressions per month by the end of Q1 2016. Though the data is only representative of Brand Networks' ad impressions, not the whole of Instagram, it shows a clear trend for Instagram advertising in general.
This is what the staggering growth looks like in a graph:
(Brand Networks)
The average cost per-1000 impressions on Instagram also increased, but at a much slower rate. It rose from $5.21 in September to a peak of $7.20 in November, before dropping to $5.94 in December:
(Brand Networks)
Jamie Tedford, CEO of Brand Networks told Business Insider: "One thing that really surprised our analysts was the fact that almost half of the ad impressions we served in November were video ads. This content type is experiencing a meteoric ascent to prominence in Instagram ad campaigns much faster than expected. A shocking 92% of the ad impressions we served on Cyber Monday were video ads."
Brand Networks also provided data on the average cost per thousand impressions by industry. It will cost a brand a lot more to advertise "fashion" than "travel" or "casual dining" on Instagram:
(Brand Networks)
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