Imagine holding your thumb on your phone screen and having to sit through an ad for McDonald’s before you can view a six second video of your friend’s dog chasing its tail? That hellish idea looks like becoming a reality soon enough, with the wildly popular video/photo sharing app Snapchat reportedly set to introduce integrated ads and news articles to its service.
The company – which by the way turned down a $3billion acquisition offer from Facebook that likely would have made such a move fiscally avoidable – seems set to launch a service in November called Snapchat Discovery, which would display ads, TV and Movie clips, as well as news articles through the peer-to-peer app.
This new feature for the service is very much in the same vein as Snapchat Stories, which let users and brands post videos that were viewable for up to 24 hours. Snapchat also trialled extended content throughout the recent FIFA World Cup in Brazil.
Brands themselves have already begun using Snapchat as a marketing service, with McDonald’s and Taco Bell both having company Snapchat accounts that… uh… send out photos of burgers and tacos, I’m assuming.
The reality is that the penetration and usage that the app has amongst the highly coveted under-25 demographic is enormous and, as of yet, largely untapped. Partly because the company – at least for a while – seemed pretty content to let people simply have a fun thing without stapling a sales pitch on top of it.
One thing’s for certain, you’re gonna be feeling a really confusing range of emotions in a short amount of time if you have to look at 6 seconds of fast food tacos before you look at 6 seconds of a sexy someone’s taco.
Photo: Lionel Bonaventure via Getty Images.
