Zuckerberg Admits: 'Instagram Is A Few Years From Being An Important Business For Us'

Flickr / Takeshi

All those people who complained when they said ads were coming to Instagram can now take it back: On Facebook's first quarter earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said that Instagram was "a few years away from being an important business" for the company.

Later in the call, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg corroborated that statement, saying that the company was focusing on consumer growth and moving "very slowly" on monetization.

That's why you're seeing hardly an ads on Instagram.

Instagram (which Facebook bought in 2012 for $1 billion) just passed 200 million mobile active users and introduced sponsored posts late last year. It's on course to rival Twitter in size. The company also landed a $100 million advertising commitment in March from agency holding company Omnicom.

Because it's such a visually beautiful medium, Instagram is, in theory, a great ad product. On the call, Sandberg talked about a recent Levi's campaign targeting the 18-34 year-old market that reached over 7 million people and drove a 24% lift in ad recall (how memorable the ads were to people who saw them).

With results like that, it's confusing as to why Facebook doesn't expect to make money off Instagram for several years.

"We really want to grow it slowly and deliberately," Sandberg said.