Today the internet is filled with news about Instagram changing their Terms of Use. The meat of this changes, for me at least, is this:
You agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you,
This basically means that Instagram/Facebook will be able to take your beautiful photo (and in case you are famous, your name) and sell it to some other company to use in their advertisements. Without, off course, you getting a penny.
Had Instagram followed YouTube’s example and shared the revenue with content creators this would be a win-win situation. Authors would get money for their hard work, while Instagram would make almost the same amount of money and attract more and more talented photographers. With this, I’m afraid, they’ll push quality authors away leaving them with average crap photos that nobody will be willing to pay for. I just can’t see how this could work out in favour of Instagram.
I’m now seriously considering deleting my account (first started thinking about it when they removed twitter integration), but I decided to wait just a bit longer to see if this will actually go trough or not.