Snapchat hasn’t made even $1 in revenue and is already valued at over $10 billion according to numbers from it’s last round of fundraising. Now just shortly after hitting 27 million users, Snapchat CEO announced on Wednesday in an interview with Katie Couric at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco “People are going to see the first ads on Snapchat soon,” Spiegel said. “We’re cutting through the new technology around ads to the core of it, which is telling a story.”

Last year Snapchat introduced their stories feature and then earlier this year further built on that feature by creating “Our Stories”, which is essentially a story but it is a collection of stories from all people that are at a certain event. The first event to feature this story for EDM in Las Vegas. Both these features have been laying the groundwork for businesses to begin advertising on Snapchat.

Although we don’t have many details yet, this could be the next big thing for e-marketers. Advertising directly to people’s stories or creating your own event story. In my opinion advertising directly to people’s stories is not very useful for businesses because they are very easy to ignore, unless these ads will show up while users are watching other stories instead and advertisers are charged on a per view basis. This way while watching a 30 second Snapchat from my friend I may see a 10 second ad from a random company. The create your own “our story” feature could be useful when a company is a big sponsor for events. Taking into consideration that rumours are saying you will not be able to target users, this is looking like it may be a big flop at first unless significant improvements are made to make this appealing for marketers. Guess we will find out more details before the official launch in November.

Source: Business Insider; Forbes