Problem with Instagram is that even "legitimate" posts are sponsored by companies paying influencers to soft peddle their stuff.
The overlap between the HN crowd and the crowd following influencers is probably minimal, but as far as a % of the platform, I'd wager most people are going through these soft ads unwittingly.
Apparently, Cristiano Ronaldo makes more from Instagram posts than what he makes from soccer.
Also, instagram is supposedly the platform with highest organic conversions & so I expect instagram come up with a way to monetize this off-platform Ad deals if not already.
Does any country have a law telling these influencers need to inform their followers about their sponsorship? Such laws exist for affiliate marketing.
"Does any country have a law telling these influencers need to inform their followers about their sponsorship? Such laws exist for affiliate marketing."
Now most are very careful and even "overdisclose" advertising as a result (they disclose even for products they mention that they are not paid for it).
Even on HN I've pleasantly told people to please disclose affiliate links (that I've only found out about because I click them and uBlock blocks the page from loading completely due to malicious amounts of tracking scripts) and people get upset about it.
I wish they would overdisclose here. It does not help that on social media, lots of people think adding "#sp" is enough.
A lot of his soccer salary is advertising money too. Some team revenue comes from ticket sales and merchandise sales but much more comes from TV rights which are funded by advertisements.
There's a couple handfuls of people I know personally who still use it as all-photo Facebook, and just post pictures of their dogs, or their kids, or their lunch.
Everything else is wall-to-wall hustling. Explicitly sponsored ads, business accounts promoting their stuff, meme pages that are hawking stuff in the comments, managed celebrity accounts, fitness models shilling supplements, and on and on and on.
Every purchase my fiance has made from an Instagram has been low quality Chinese junk. In a couple cases, we've found the exact SKU for sale on aliexpress for ~ 1/3 the price.
It's ridiculous when some of the Instagram ads are drop shipped from China at 4x the price of AliExpress. At least relocate the product to the US for faster shipping if you're going to charge more. The fluffy soft shiba inu pillows are advertised at like $30 on instagram with 2-3 week shipping and AliExpress has the same lead time and they're $8.
It may seem like a problem in isolation, but only if you ignore the alternatives.
Do you remember television or radio? How much choice did you have over the ads there? You'd literally have to sit through mass-market beer ads for minutes at a time.
With Instagram, the ads and soft-ads are oftentimes quite targeted. I get ads about theatre plays, musicals and ballet in my city. I wouldn't have found out about them otherwise - I think it's great! You can actually select an ad and say 'don't show me this stuff anymore' and provide a reason. I get to no longer see ads I don't like! Phew, that's a killer feature!
If the people you follow on instagram are generic, you get generic ads. If you follow niche markets, you get niche ads that you may be glad to find out about. Internet ads have become a reflection of sorts, if you are bothered by the ads, maybe what you're really bothered by is unfulfilled potential that the ads are a reflection of.
I get a lot of ads from Boeing. They want to sell a military helicopter. No joke. I don’t think the targeting works all that well. (It’s Twitter, not insta though)
I too experience better ads on Instagram (relevant positions with local companies, software I actually guve a second look etc) than on Google (until this summer they were dead set on showing me ads for scammy dating sites whenever I disabled my ad blocker despite the fact that I put ib the effort to tell them multiple times it was irrelevant.)
The overlap between the HN crowd and the crowd following influencers is probably minimal, but as far as a % of the platform, I'd wager most people are going through these soft ads unwittingly.