Snapchat will soon start “experimenting” with placing sponsored messages next to chat threads from friends, according to CEO Evan Spiegel.
These “Sponsored Snaps” from brands will appear as unread messages in Snapchat’s main Chat tab, implying that they’ll sit above messages from a person’s contacts until they’re acted on. This is the first time Snap will show ads in the most used part of its app.
In an employee memo also posted on the company’s website, Spiegel says that Sponsored Snaps will appear “without a push notification, and opening the message is optional.” It’s unclear how easy it will be to get rid of a Sponsored Snap without opening it, or if doing so will even be possible. (Snap declined to comment beyond Spiegel’s memo.)
“Sponsored Snaps empower advertisers to communicate visually with the Snapchat community, making the core functionality of Snapchat accessible to advertisers,” writes Spiegel, who goes on to note that, “As always, your conversations with friends are private and are not used for advertising purposes.”
To understand why Snap is doing this now, look no further than its stock price, which is hovering near an all-time low. Although it has more than 850 million monthly users worldwide, Snap’s advertising business is still small compared to its biggest competitors, including Meta. Snap has yet to make a profit.
“Growth in our digital advertising business is one of the biggest contributors to our long-term earnings, and investors are concerned that it will not accelerate,” Spiegel wrote in the notes. Snap also allows advertisers to pay to promote locations on the Maps tab, allowing Snapchat users to see their friends’ locations, the 13-year-old company wrote.
