Digital Week in Review: Ads on Instagram, Twitter’s Most Popular Brands, and Investors Don’t Want Bill Gates as Chairman

In this week’s Digital Week in Review: Instagram will be slowly introducing advertisements into your feed, a list of Twitter’s 20 most popular brands, and three of Microsoft’s top 20 investors want Bill Gates ousted as chairman.

Advertisements Will be Coming to Instagram

Instagram will be introducing ads into its feed in the next couple of months. The Facebook owned photo sharing platform promises to “start slow” and to only delivery high quality photos and videos in order to make it feel “as natural as the rest of the content in the user’s feed”.

“We have big ideas for the future, and part of making them happen is building Instagram into a sustainable business. In the next couple of months, you may begin seeing an occasional ad in your Instagram feed if you’re in the U.S. Seeing photos and videos from brands you don’t follow will be new, so we’ll start slow. We’ll focus on delivering a small number of beautiful, high-quality photos and videos from a handful of brands that are already great members of the Instagram community.”-Instagram

Advertising on Instagram was first mentions back in June by Facebook Vice President Carolyn Everson in an interview with AD Age, by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in July’s Q2 earnings call and in September by Instagram Director of Business Operation Emily White in a interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Read more here.

Twitter’s Most Popular Brands

The most followed brand on Twitter is YouTube with 34 million followers, which has beaten out Instagram and even Twitter’s own page. The Twitter brand itself has over 25 million followers, and in second place there is Instagram with almost 28 million. Facebook makes the top 10 at number 6 with 12 million. See below for the full top 20 list.

1. YouTube (@YouTube, 34,270,033 followers)
2. Instagram (@instagram, 27,688,3668)
3. Twitter (@twitter, 24,590,406)
4. CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk, 13,479,463)
5. Twitter en español (@twitter_es, 13,167,921)
6. Facebook (@Facebook, 12,296,628)
7. UberSocial (@UberSoc, 10,922,150)
8. CNN (@cnn, 10,309,469)
9. FC Barcelona (@FCBarcelona, 10,176,769)
10. MTV (@MTV, 9,726,408)
11. The New York Times (@nytimes, 9,653,988)
12. TwitPic (@twitpic, 9,043,448)
13. Real Madrid F.C. (@realmadrid, 9,004,688)
14. NBA (@NBA, 8,281,151)
15. BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking, 7,372,588)
16. ESPN (@espn, 7,231,395)
17. A Googler (@google, 7,154,663)
18. Ramalan Indonesia (@TweetRAMALAN, 6,909,053)
19. Funny Or Die (@funnyordie, 6,945,337)
20. Breaking News (@BreakingNews, 6,245,437)

Top Microsoft Investors Want Bill Gates Out

Three of Microsoft’s top 20 investors want to Remove Bill gates from his current role of Chairman. CEO is Steve Ballmer is currently stepping down and if Bill Gates were to follow too, this could incur a huge moment in the company’s history. Investors feel that Gates is “holding the company back from finding new direction” and while they don’t want him to exit the board entirely, they do want to remove him from his current position. So far there is little indication that Bill Gates will actually leave his position and still has no intention of returning to his former job of CEO.

Read more here.