Snapchat will soon be including advertising within the app, according to CEO Evan Spiegel.
Thankfully for many users, the ads will not be included within the main messaging service, but rather in the Stories section of the app. Stories add Snaps together to create a narrative. "When you add a Snap to your Story it lives for 24 hours before it disappears, making room for the new," according to an Oct. 3 blog post.
"We're cutting through the new technology around ads to the core of it, which is telling a story," said Spiegel at an event.
While ads will be included in the app, users need not be too frustrated. Ads will be opt-out, so users can choose not to see advertising whenever they want. The ads will also not be targeted.
"They aren't fancy, they are not targeted," continued Spiegel.
While this may be good news for some privacy advocates, others know untargeted ads under a different name: Spam. Untargeted ads are the types of ads that users don't want to see because they are normally irrelevant to the user.
While it is not completely surprising that Snapchat will be using ads on its app, the service also really doesn't need to serve untargeted ads. It could use social media login data to serve ads that are relevant to users and that would make the service more money.
In fact, in a way Snapchat has been serving targeted ads for a while now. Brands such as Taco Bell started tapping into Stories, although those promotions were only displayed to people who willingly followed the brand.
More details about Snapchat serving ads were not given. It is likely that eventually Snapchat will start serving targeted ads instead. The service is also reportedly working on what it's calling "Discovery," which would essentially allow users to view Stories from large media companies, in essence a mini-blog on features or new releases.
It was expected that Snapchat would begin serving ads at some point. Apart from the fact that the company will need to start showing investors that it can make a lot of money, it also reportedly turned down a $3 billion acquisition from Facebook, suggesting that the company has grand plans for the future. Despite this, it is clear the service wants to tread carefully with advertising, as shown by the fact that it will incorporate ads in the Stories section rather than the core messaging service.
It is also expected that at some point Snapchat will start collecting user data in some way. While social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter both have a lot of data about their users, Snapchat deletes most of its user data soon after it is created. Perhaps the service could serve targeted ads based on things like keywords in messages, although if that were the case the service would not delete messages.
