Snapchat to put ads next to chats with friends

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said the company will soon begin an “experiment” to display sponsored messages next to chat threads from friends.

These “Sponsored Snaps” from brands will appear as unread messages in Snapchat’s main chat tab, meaning they will appear above messages from users’ contacts until action is taken. This marks the first time Snap will display ads in the most used parts of the app.

Employee notes Posted on the company’s websiteSpiegel said sponsored snaps “appear without push notifications and that opening the message is optional.” It’s unclear how easy it would be to delete a sponsored snap without opening it, or whether it’s even possible. (Snap declined to comment beyond Spiegel’s memo.)

“Sponsored Snaps allow advertisers to visually communicate with the Snapchat community and unlock Snapchat’s core functionality,” Spiegel said, adding that “as always, conversations with friends remain private and will not be used for advertising purposes.”

To understand why Snap is doing this now, one need only look at its stock price, which is at an all-time low. Though it now has more than 850 million monthly users worldwide, Snap’s advertising business is still tiny compared to its biggest rivals, like Meta, and the company is still unprofitable.

“The growth of our digital advertising business is one of the most important factors to our long-term earnings potential, and investors are concerned that our growth has slowed,” Spiegel wrote in a note marking the company’s 13th anniversary. He wrote that advertisers will also begin paying to promote locations on the Maps tab, where Snapchat users can see the locations of their friends.