Facebook-owned short video-making app Instagram Reels is bringing ads to Reels in a few countries, including India. The full-screen ads will be arriving first in India, Germany, Brazil and Australia before landing in more countries "in the coming months."
According to an Engadget report, the spots are similar to Instagram's ads for Stories.
Ads can run up to 30 seconds and users can interact with them the way they would with organic posts (including skipping them altogether). Ads can also include "shop now" buttons, according to screenshots shared by the company, the report said.
Facebook is also experimenting with a new ad format for Stories -- sticker ads, it added. Meant for influencers, the ads "allow creators to monetise their Facebook Stories with ads that look like stickers and receive a portion of the resulting revenue."
The brand-created stickers will allow influencers to link to specific products their followers can buy.
A spokesperson noted that it's the first time Facebook has experimented with a feature within Stories but declined to provide details of the arrangements.
The feature will be available to a "select" group of advertisers and creators. Sticker ads are the latest of several monetisation tools Instagram has explored.
It also allows creators to sell badges and products in live streams and shares revenue with creators who run ads in IGTV.
Instagram had earlier announced a new feature called Remix that will let users create, share and add their own perspective and fun on its Reels platform.
Instagram users can "remix" a reel, meaning they can upload a video next to another user's, building on top of the original clip. The feature is already popular on TikTok, often for dance challenges, under the "duet" function.
Since the launch of Reels last year, several features have been added to it. This includes extending the recording time limit up to 30 seconds, extending the countdown timer to 10 seconds while recording, and adding options to trim and delete clips from the timeline.