Dive Brief:
- Image-sharing social platform Imgur is introducing a new native ad unit focused on reaching mobile users, according to Ad Week.
- The units, called promoted posts, will appear in Imgur users' content stream and have the ability to feature video.
- There is no targeting capability for the posts, but that matches the "shared experience" that Imgur users want from their stream, Steve Patrizi, VP of revenue and marketing at Imgur, told Ad Week.
Dive Insight:
Imgur’s audience of geeky millennial males is highly desirable to marketers, but it's challenging to figure out what that demographic will find cool or fun. Imgur boasts 150 million monthly users on its stream of internet memes and GIFs.
Similar to how Snapchat first approached marketers, Imgur isn't offer targeting for its ad units, but says the ads have been well-received by users in testing so far. Imgur said about two-thirds of users that voted on a post gave it an "upvote."
"They love the idea of a unifying stream, a single content stream that everyone sees, providing a shared experience that gives them all something in common," Patrizi told Adweek. "We believe promoted posts should behave in the same way, and each promoted post is inserted into that single Imgur stream."
Imgur's native ad unit comes as publishers and social media platforms are increasingly coming out with new native ad offerings for advertisers. Native ads are often less intrusive and more effective than most other ad units.
The format is only growing in importance: Native ads currently make up 56% of all display ad revenue, according to data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), PwC and IHS, but BI Intelligence predicts that native advertising will account for 74% of all ad revenue by 2021.