Instagram might plan to charge a fee to put links in captions
Instagram is not just for people who like curating their feed or posting selfies. Many online sellers thrive on promoting their products and services through this social media platform, including influencers. But there seems a proposal to charge for putting links on photo captions. What’s this all about?
Two dollars per link on the caption
Mike Murphy discovered a patent filing suggests that Instagram might be thinking about charging the said fee. Instagram’s parent company Facebook did a submission of the patent way back in 2016. It shows that a pop-up message will appear when a user adds a URL to a caption. The message box prompts if the user wants to pay two US dollars to make the link live.
The patent application has a working title: adding paid links to media captions in a social networking system. It explains, “If the online system detects the text content of the caption includes a string of link text identifying an address, the online system prompts the posting user to pay a fee in exchange for generating a link.”
This feature will allegedly address one of the biggest issues of users on Instagram. There’s no means yet of adding URLs to the photo’s captions. Most users proceed with the “link in bio” as an alternative. On the other hand, will influencers, brands, and other users pay for this service? The only thing that is clear right now is that this is a great way to generate income for Instagram.
As with any other patent, Instagram may never actually add this feature. Big companies apply for patents most of the time without making a follow-through. So there’s no assurance if this pay-per-link fee will happen.
What are your thoughts about this patent? Do you think it’s a nice feature to have or not really necessary?
