Suppose you are comfortably seated on your couch waiting to open Snapchat to check your messages from friends. You have the app on your phone and when you open it, there at the top of the list of your chats is a message which appears to be from a friend. But hold on, it is not from a friend, it’s a ‘Sponsored Snap’ from a company that wants your attention!
Snapchat has recently revealed that it would start testing the placement of ads alongside the chat streams from your friends.
What Are “Sponsored Snaps”?
The Snapchat CEO has described the sponsored snaps as messages that pop up in the main chat section of the application and look like you have not yet opened them.
As a result, they will appear right above the messages coming from your friends until you respond to them.
The good news is, they are emails too and opening them is not obligatory, the push notification will not be a part of them, so they will not be knocking on your phone’s door all the time. It remains to be seen though just how easy it will be to decline or delete these ads without having to first open them. Snap has been relatively uncommunicative about facts.
Why Is Snapchat Doing This Now?
To understand why Snapchat is going in this direction, all that you need to do is to check on their stock performance – it’s going down. Snap has 850 million active users worldwide who are active on its platform on a monthly basis, but its advertising segment is still insignificant compared with that of Meta. Now, I don’t think you can exactly call them cash rich at the moment; they are still far from attaining profitability. Basically, what it means that Snapchat really requires to have more revenues, and as soon as possible.
Their digital advertising business is an essential growth vehicle for future revenues, and investors are starting to get a bit restless. Thus, by advertising where the users are the most active, such as the Chat tab, Snapchat plans on increasing the ad revenue. As Spiegel himself pointed out this is one of the cornerstones they will be relying on to get their operations back on track.
Will this impact how you and your friends talk when on the phone?
Here’s the good news: Friends will not see any advertisements within the application since snapchat guarantees that no information about the conversations will be shared. In other words, an ad is not going to use your conversation about last night’s pizza party.
The bad news?
Your chat list might start to resemble some sort of a random selection of advertisers all in one.
What Other Features Does Snapchat Have in Store?
If you believe that Sponsored Snaps are the main feature that Snapchat has up its sleeves, then you are wrong. Map is also going to attempt to monetize one of the sections of its Map tab wherein it will offer advertisers an opportunity to pay for promotion involving places.
Yeah that one which shows where your friends are often hanging out or if they are currently online. Well, before long you might also notice some advertisements of local businesses or events appearing on that part. And now it appears Snapchat is willing to look for new creative ways to play with the advertisers and with their users.
Well, for the every day Snapchat user, this simply means that more complicated snaps await them in the future. Well, you might be seeing ads that are placed in areas that are new to you and therefore, you may have to adapt. there will be individuals who may not mind it at all, there will also be those that will frown at it.
But do not forget that these changes are at the experimental stage, and Snapchat may adjust something based on people’s reaction.
