The popular app goes down the Facebook path, seeks to sell Ads and News Content.
After 3 years and 27 million users, Snapchat is finally in talks with advertisers to sell Ads and News Content on the application. In a new service called ‘Snapchat Discovery’, it plans to allow advertisers and media companies to display ads and other content to its users. According to the report in The Wall Street Journal, Snapchat has been in talks with at least a dozen media companies.
Snapchat was launched in July 2011 as an app that allows users to click pictures and send them to recipients, who had access to the picture only for a few seconds, after which they would be deleted forever. The popularity of Snapchat has greatly multiplied in the last few years. Earlier this month, ComScore said that it was the third-most popular social media app in the 18-34 age group category.
After all this success, the photo-app has finally set itself up to get to the next level – Revenue. Last year, in November 2013, Snapchat famously declined a $3 billion offer from Facebook. After going revenue-less for 3 years and surviving on money raised from investors, this is going to be a major step for the app that manages around 500 million “snaps” a day.
However, in the past, marketers have promoted their brands and reached out to their audiences on the app through a feature called ‘Snapchat Stories” wherein users can broadcast photos to a large group of users. Some companies have already been using this feature to reach out to their customers, but Snapchat Discovery will allow marketers to market their product to users who aren’t actively reaching out to them.
