Snapchat CEO Spiegel Says Untargeted Advertising Is Coming Soon
Snapchat, the popular mobile app for disappearing messages, is close to launching its first disappearing ads as the company sets out to prove its $10 billion valuation. — Evan Spiegel, the startup's 24-year-old co-founder …
Context & Ripple Effects
Snapchat has been telegraphing this move since November 2013, when it laid out plans for an API and experimental monetization spanning ads, stickers and virtual gifts (an early monetization roadmap). Since then it has stacked up revenue-adjacent features: geofilters in July 2014 flagged by the company itself as a potential new revenue stream, and the collaborative Our Story format tested live during the World Cup final.
Why it matters: the company is reportedly raising money at a $10 billion valuation — talks with investors including Alibaba were circulating in July 2014 but remain unconfirmed — so this first ad product doubles as the opening argument that ephemeral-messaging attention can be sold at all.
First-order effects
- Brands get their first way to buy Snapchat inventory: disappearing, untargeted units placed into Stories-style content, meaning early buyers are paying for reach inside a hot youth audience rather than data-matched precision.
- Spiegel explicitly ties the launch to proving the $10 billion valuation, so the first campaigns will be judged as much on advertiser willingness to pay as on revenue booked.
Second-order effects
- Twitter and Facebook face a new claim on brand budgets: if Snapchat sells mass reach on Live-event content, it competes directly for the TV-companion dollars that Twitter's event strategy was built to capture.
- The untargeted pitch forces the rest of mobile advertising to defend why its targeting premium is worth more than Snapchat's raw young-audience attention — a pricing argument that will shape how other messaging apps package their own inventory.
Third-order effects
- If reach-based selling works on a messaging platform, the industry gains a template for monetizing apps whose users resist being profiled — and pressure will build toward adding behavioral targeting later, the standard path every ad business eventually walks.
- A successful launch would also harden investor appetite for multi-billion-dollar valuations of pre-revenue messaging apps, making 'attention first, data later' an accepted sequencing rather than a leap of faith.
The trend: Messaging apps are building advertising businesses on raw audience reach first, with data-driven targeting treated as a later layer rather than a launch prerequisite.