Snapchat and Instagram have been embroiled in a bitter feature war for some time now, but the former is going to start testing an addition I’d wager no one’s going to like: Unskippable six-second ads. Fuck yeah, that’ll keep the dwindling user-base around.
But look, I get it, the app’s parent company Snap Inc has been struggling to turn a profit, so things like this just become a necessary evil at some point, but making the videos unskippable will undoubtedly ruffle more than a few feathers.
According to Digiday, the six-second advertisements have been dubbed “Commercials“ and will begin the test phase in the middle of May. It’s not all that clear where the ads will show up, but it won’t be in personal stories or the Discover news section. They’re expected to be high-quality ads from huge companies.
According to reports, the test is purely to see how many ads users will put up with before cracking the shits. Given the rate of people who skip the ads already present is astronomically high, I don’t like the chances of a good outcome for Snap.
It’s been a tough trot for for Snapchat, which copped a huge amount of criticism for its app redesign, much of which rumbled its stock value. You gotta feel for a company who can lose billions of dollars just because someone like Kylie Jenner posts one fucking tweet about it. That’s gotta suck.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see how these tests go in the coming months.
