A news coming in related to Instagram which might be a bad one for the influencers is that Instagram might soon charge you a small fee for adding links to your photo captions.
A Patent application has been discovered by ‘Protocol’, that suggests that Instagram would charge you a $2 (approx Rs 146) fee for adding clickable links to the captions of your photos.
The patent also describes how the system would work, stating, “If the online system detects the text content of the caption includes a string of link text identifying an address, the online system prompts the posting user to pay a fee in exchange for generating a link.”
The patent application was first submitted by Facebook, also the parent company of Instagram, back in January of 2016.
The ability to add links for any products, stories, etc, into the captions if your photos is currently only available to users who have more than 10,000 followers or a verified account, while other normal users don’t have the option to do so.
These regular users then use the ‘Link in bio’ way, where they add the link in their profile bio settings and then write ‘Link in Bio’ in the captions. This is a complaint by many users but Instagram hasn’t given any heed to these complaints.
The patent also states that the link would be disabled if the user doesn’t pay the fee. The fee charge may also depend on the type of profile where it may charge the fee if its a business account and it may not charge if its a regular user account or some other non-business account.