When Facebook bought up the mobile picture app last year we knew there was a motive behind the buy. At the time we figured that it was all about blocking the competition, but now we see the brilliance (and the underhanded side too) of this move. Facebook has to find a way to earn more revenue. Their own efforts at advertising have not met with much success so they have turned to… let’s say “alternative options. One of the biggest ones is their paid spam option that Facebook calls “pay to promote” this is where you can pay Facebook to push your posts to a large audience. If you do not does this then only about 20-30% of your actual fans or friends will get to see it. The rest will get it buried in their news feed and unless they take extra steps will likely miss your posts.

Now they are looking to sell off the pictures that the millions of Instagram users are posting daily. It is likely that they will be able to cash in on this quite nicely simply based on percentages. When you have millions being uploaded there are bound to be a few that some company might want for their ads. This move is a classic Zukerberg move and goes to show that Facebook really does not have their users’ interests in mind.

Although Instagram/Facebook will be sure to get some money from this the real winners here are going to be the Instagram alternatives that will be gaining some new users in the coming days and weeks after January 16th 2013. The losers here are the people that have uploaded their personal pictures and now find that they are not theirs any longer. This is one of the primary dangers of any cloud application. There will come a time when you could suddenly find that all of what you thought was your own private work now does not belong to you; with nothing more than a few extra lines in the Terms and Conditions that you singed…

What do you think about this move by Facebook/Instagram? Tell us in our Forum