^ this. or something like this. It always bugs me that the only way anyone has figured out how to monetize anything online is by throwing up some ads on it. Its ugly, intrusive, and the users end up pretty much tuning them out anyway. Surely there has to be a better way to make money.

-prints, photobooks, physical stuff like that. people into making their photos look vintagey would surely love to place their fake polaroid next to their record collection.

-All instagram images are geotagged and timestamped. How about you partner with media outlets and allow them to leverage all the images being taken for specific events? "instagram @ SXSW" or whatever.

-"license this image" - Lets say I run a food blog. clearly a great place to look for imagery of food is on instagram. I could affordably license the image and give money to the photographer (and instagram gets a cut.)

-etc, etc, etc,

These are just off the top of my head. I'm not saying these are brilliant ideas, or that they would necessarily work at all. What I am saying is that I wish that we'd explore solutions outside of "lets plaster ads all over it." It's an ineffective way of making money that's just stolen from the slowly-dying magazine industry, and is that really the industry you want to emulate?

I've used printstagr.am, and liked it. The prints are fun just like the instagram photos. It would be cool if this were built in to Instagram, and I could mail the prints as a gift.

Yup that's what I was thinking. Build in the functionality to order prints straight from the app. They could expand to postcards which I think would be awesome.

Expand it out even more. If you make a postcard or printout of my photo, give me a cut of the money (even if it's a small one). Let me use that credit towards my own postcards, or if I get a ton of it, cash it out.

It would also encourage brands to put good content up, rather than just being a boring corporate mouthpiece, which is always a plus.

That's cool. I like PostalPix, which is similar. I agree that Instagram could definitely do something like this to make money instead of ads. The ability to produce worthwhile physical products from your service is an advantage over something like Twitter or Facebook.