Selfies, Food and Ads: Advertisements Coming to Instagram in the Coming Months

Oct. 3, 2013 — -- Those photos of a delicious cronuts, cute puppies or well-composed selfies in your Instagram feed will soon be joined by advertisements.

After months of saying it would experiment with advertising on its extremely popular photo and video sharing app, Instagram announced today that it will begin to surface ads in its iOS and Android apps.

"We have big ideas for the future, and part of making them happen is building Instagram into a sustainable business," the company wrote in a blog post on its website. "In the next couple months, you may begin seeing an occasional ad in your Instagram feed if you're in the United States."

The advertising will be part of the core experience, or what is called native advertising. Brands and companies will pay for their "high-quality photos and videos" to appear in your feed. Similar to Facebook, which bought Instagram last year for $1 billion, users will be able to hide an ad they don't like or isn't relevant to them.

Instagram also specifically said in its blog post that your photos and videos continue to belong to you, likely addressing the issues it had months ago when it made changes to its terms of service, implying it might take users' photos and place them in ads.

"As always, you own your own photos and videos. The introduction of advertising won't change this," Instagram said in the post.

Instagram's move to add advertising into feeds comes as Twitter is expected to release its IPO filing any day now. Similar to Facebook, Twitter is expected to reveal more information about its native advertising business in the filing.