Kevin Systrom Says Over 5% Of Instagram Ad Impressions Have Led To Likes

Instagram ads are off to a strong start. CEO Kevin Systrom said about the early ads that “Over 5% of the impression led to Likes on these ads that we’ve run. That’s pretty tremendous considering most of the dasds we see on the internet we ignore.” At the GigaOm Roadmap conference Systrom also said many of the comments were people asking where they could buy the Michael Kors watch.

In conversation with Om Malik, Systrom discussed that ads are just one more step in the transition of Instagram into a world-changing company. ‘We’re now at 150 million+ active users. [We’ve gone from a] cool startup in Silicon Valley into something that affects the mainstream” Systrom said.

Om asked whether the ads roll out was “working out”. Systrom explained “Are they making us hundreds of millions of dollars per day? No, but that was the goal. We announced we’d take it slow doing it the right way. We measure the “how it’s going” by how the roll out is going and how we’re making this transition.”