After YouTube, Instagram, the Meta-owned social media platform, seems to be testing a new feature that will show ‘unskippable’ ads while you are scrolling your feeds. News comes in that the proposed feature is known as ‘Ad Breaks’.
Reportedly, Meta seems to be rolling out the experimental change to a small group of users at present.
The new update!
From what it is understood, when one user clicked on the ‘i’ button to see what Ad Breaks does, a pop up came. The pop-up read, “Ad breaks are a new way of seeing ads on Instagram. Sometimes you may need to view an ad before you can keep browsing.”
It looks like, for the past few days we saw many unskippable ads on other platforms, such as YouTube, where we usually see such ads before a video starts (or, in the middle, if it’s a longer video). Some of these are pretty annoying, at least YouTube videos typically last longer than a few seconds.
However, it seems like the ads on Instagram often skips through posts a lot faster, apparently making ad breaks feel far more ‘intrusive.’
Netizens react!
After all the buzz around this proposed Insta feature, the new functionality seems to be creating frustration among users. Many users seem to be discussing whether to stop using Instagram if the platform decides to stick with the changes.
“Got the Instagram ‘ad break’ again & this time I clicked the info button to see their explanation. So abusive to their users to do this,” @TheDanLevy posted on X. He also added “ Was wondering if I’m just out of the loop & this has been a thing happening for a while but it looks like it’s a pretty new way that Instagram is testing out to abuse their audience…or at least that’s what I’m seeing on Reddit. A sign of the end of IG?”
Another Reddit user added, “Meta has top tier UX designers, did they not do any research on this before pushing it onto the public? It completely disrupts the user’s flow.”
However, the company hasn’t officially said anything about ‘Ad Breaks’.Critics argue that the social media platform is forcing some users to ‘watch three to five seconds of unskippable ads before they can resume scrolling.’
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