Marco Arment writes:
I’d guess that Instagram could have charged a few bucks for their app from the start, made us their customers, budgeted carefully, and avoided VC funding and advertising. But they chose the free-now-ads-later model, and it appears to be working very well.
Ah, the free-now-ads-later model. Also usually known as the starting signal for users finding the next thing that’s “free now”. It will be quite interesting to see if that happens to Instagram, as it has to many others.