I'm always surprised by the sheer amount of ads on Instagram. TikTok barely shows me any ads, even through prolonged periods of me using the app. Using Instagram is pain with the constant amount of identical ads being shoved down the pipeline.
This would make me suspicious, and my first assumption would be that the ads are hidden as fake content. On reddit it's quite obvious, when there's yet another /r/funny post about some (for example) "funny" Coke bottle thing or some other brand. Lots of those kinds of posts, actually. Also a lot of quite obvious fake engagement-encouraging posts, such as the many question reddits with thread-creating questions (/r/AskReddit comes to mind, a large subreddit also shown on the frontpage when I'm not logged in) that even look and sound like they were planned and designed (and they all have a similar vibe, as if coming from the same source).
Modern ads are not the obvious type that are marked as such. It's more like product placement and a bunch of other less obvious methods.
They're either hidden extremely well, I'm oblivious to them or they're not there as much I'd say.
Most of the things I get on TikTok are, I would argue, genuine content that someone made because they wanted to or is following along a trend that is ongoing. I don't get a lot of people showing off a product, and often when they do it's for stuff I'm interested in and I'm already following them for.
Perhaps its a matter of diversity. Instagram feels very monotone in its ads: bottom barrel mobile games or brands trying to sell me their garbage I don't need nor would be interested in. TikTok on the other hand feels less monotonous in what I get shown.
I’m almost positive that Instagram also has those sort of embedded promotions/ads, which are generally done outside of the official platform. But they also have a metric shitton of actual ads, within their own platform, that they queued up.
