As was reported in August, advertisements are finally about to come to Snapchat. Evan Spiegel, the company’s co-founder and CEO, made the announcement today at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit. “People are going to see the first ads on Snapchat soon,” he told Katie Couric, who moderated a discussion with him and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. “We think they’re pretty cool.”
Ads are coming soon to Snapchat, CEO Evan Spiegel says
They’ll be part of Stories, and you can choose not to watch them
They’ll be part of Stories, and you can choose not to watch them
is the editor of the Platformer newsletter and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast.
"We think they're pretty cool."
The ads will be part of Snapchat’s Stories feature, Spiegel said. And they’ll be “opt-in” — users can choose to look at them or skip by them. From Spiegel’s description, it sounded as if ads would not interrupt the normal messages that users send between each other. Instead, it seems likely they’ll be part of what the company calls Our Story — the snaps that users submit to events like weekend college football or Oktoberfest in Germany. It’s easy to imagine a beer company paying to put a snap inside the Oktoberfest story for example.
Snapchat collects less information about its users than social networks like Facebook or Twitter. Spiegel said ads would not be targeted at users — they would simply be inserted into the story for whoever was using the app to look at them. Spiegel did not confirm an exact timeline for the rollout of ads.
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