[nhangen]

They know and they don't care. It's not a customer's prerogative to worry about how a company makes money. As much as people like Instagram, if it disappeared or went under, people would move on and forget about it. I would say that the onus is on the company to find a way to monetize that does not insult, mislead, or deride their users.

[clarky07]

How does adding ads "insult, mislead, or deride their users"? This whole discussion is silly. 99% of the users will keep happily using the service with ads. They were smart enough to know they were coming eventually. A 1% very vocal minority will piss and moan on internet message boards about how pissed they are and how absurd it is that this coming isn't continuing to give away a nice service.

Everyone bitched when Facebook added ads, but guess what, they keep growing and people keep using it. Shocking.