Instagram launches video carousel ads

By

Dani Greene

Published
May 9, 2016

Instagram announced on May 3 its plans to roll out video carousel ads. Video carousel ads allow advertisers post up to five 60-second videos for the price of a single ad purchase.

 
Showtime, Banana Republic, Old Navy, L’Oreal Paris and Samsung supported the launch by posting carousel video ads in a post on the Instagram for Business blog. These new video ads are now in beta and all advertisers will be able to use them in the coming weeks.
 
Last year, Instagram introduced carousel ads, the kinds of ads that let users swipe between different pages with images. But video functionality wasn’t available until now. Instagram anticipates videos in carousel will both increase the company’s SEO rankings and increasing users’ time watching ads.  

Instagram, which debuted its mobile app in 2011, is an online platform for users to share photos and videos through their cell phones, as well as a social networking services where users can share their media on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr, among others. On April 12, 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for approximately US$1 billion in cash and stock. Instagram has over 400 million active accounts and continues to increase its audience.