CEO Evan Spiegel said that Snapchat will soon begin an “experiment” to place sponsored messages next to friends’ chat threads.
These “Sponsored Snaps” from brands will appear as unread messages in Snapchat’s main Chat tab, meaning they will sit above a person’s contacts’ messages until they take action. This is the first time Snap has shown ads in the most-used parts of its app.
In an employee memo posted on the company’s website, Spiegel said sponsored snaps will have “no push notifications and the option to turn on messaging.” It’s unclear how easy it is to delete a sponsored Snap without opening it, or if it’s even possible to do so. (Snap declined to comment beyond Spiegel’s memo.)
“Sponsoring Snap allows advertisers to visually communicate with the Snapchat community, giving advertisers access to core Snapchat features,” Spiegel wrote. He went on to note, “As always, your conversations with your friends are private and unavailable. will be used for advertising purposes.”
To understand why Snap is doing this now, just look at its stock price, which is currently hovering near all-time lows. Although it now has more than 850 million monthly users worldwide, Snap’s advertising business is still small compared with its largest competitors such as Meta. Snap also remains unprofitable.
“The growth of our digital advertising business is one of the most important investments in our long-term revenue potential, and investors are concerned that we are not growing fast enough,” Spiegel wrote in his memo, which is consistent with the company’s 2013 goals. Snap will also start letting advertisers pay to promote places in its Maps tab, where Snapchat users can see the whereabouts of their friends, he wrote.
