Nothing unmonetized can stay. Not in the social app gold rush, anyhow. We knew Snapchat couldn’t keep making no money forever, and lo, CEO Evan Spiegel reminded us that he does in fact run a business, albeit a weird one. In an (unlikely) conversation with Michael Bloomberg and Katie Couric at Vanity Fair‘s inaugural New Establishment Summit, held at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center, Spiegel foreshadowed the nature of Snapchat’s plans to cash in on advertising.
“We’re cutting through the new technology around ads to the core of it, which is telling a story,” Spiegel told Couric. “People are going to see the first Snapchat ads soon, they’re going to be around our Stories product.”
Snapchat launched its Stories feature earlier this month as a sort of experiment of ephemeral storytelling. With Stories, users can uploads images into a narrative that will “vanish”—insofar as anything vanishes—within 24 hours. In July, Snapchat played around with some heavyhanded brand partnerships by introducing sponsored, location-specific Geofilters.
Beyond advertising opportunities, Stories has also proven itself a thriving platform for amateur, underage porn.
H/T Vanity Fair | Photo via yukop/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
