Snapchat will soon be generating revenue with popular advertising, CEO Evan Spiegel confirmed during a conference on Wednesday.
Snapchat, the popular photo-sharing app, will start generating revenue from advertising on its platform soon. The confirmation of the news follows a speculation in August that revealed the company's plans to integrate advertisements into its chat application. Snapchat CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel made the announcement at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit on Wednesday, confirming the monetization of the platform through advertisements will begin soon.
The 24-year-old CEO of the ephemeral photo-messaging company said the first ads will not be forced upon its users neither will they target the users based on their tastes. According to Spiegel, the ads will be a part of Snapchat's Stories feature, where users submit snaps of events like college football or a food fest. It is quite a fitting space for advertisers to promote their products with related Stories within the app.
"We're cutting through a lot of the new technology stuff around ads to sort of the core of it, which I think has always been telling a story that leaves people with a new feeling," the Wall Street Journal quoted Spiegel as saying. "They're not fancy. You just look at it if you want to look at it, and you don't if you don't."
Snapchat is ranked among the highly popular services like Facebook. The company is currently being valued at $10 billion without any source of revenue. The service has been extremely popular among users who prioritize their privacy. More than 700 million images are shared each day and more than 500 million stories are viewed daily, the company revealed.
Snapchat has been working continuously on the new advertising area as the company's COO Emily White attended the Advertising Week conference last week in New York to explain the service, Bloomberg reported. Snapchat also tapped Facebook's Mike Randall to lead its advertising partnerships, earlier this year.
The exact timeline for the roll-out of first ads on Snapchat was not revealed by Spiegel but it is happening.
