Snapchat is Getting Serious About Advertising

Snapchat is rolling out a new ad format: 10-second video ads, costing 2 cents per view, that will run between the articles and videos on the Discover section of the app, AdAge reports.

Discover launched in January with partners including Daily Mail, Vice, MTV, CNN, and Cosmopolitan producing orginal content for the photo-sharing app. Publishing partners are responsible for selling the associated ad space, sharing a percentage of the revenue with Snapchat.

The new “Two Pennies” ad format was announced at the Daily Mail’s presentation at the annual New Fronts digital advertising event, where digital media companies tout their wares to advertisers and agencies in the hope of signing upfront major deals.

Jon Steinberg, The Daily Mail’s North American CEO, described the new ad format as “transformative,” and “one of the great advertising products” alongside Google’s Adwords, YouTube’s TrueView, and Facebook’s ads, according to AdAge.

Also speaking at the New Fronts event, Snapchat’s Nick Bell said the photo-sharing app has spent the last few months experimenting with how to price ads on Discover. Digiday previously reported that Discover ads cost approximately $0.15 per view.

Previously, advertisers and agencies had balked at Snapchat’s original Discover advertising prices. Re/code had reported that advertisers were paying as much as $100 CPMs — the cost to reach 1,000 viewers — twice as much as most video ad products demand online.

One agency source told Business Insider back in March: “When they came in to initially present their pricing a few months ago it was crazy high. In the past few weeks they have come back with a much more realistic pricing structure.”

Snapchat has had to re-do a lot of its initial advertiser and ad agency sales meetings following the recent departures of former COO Emily White and VP of partnerships Mike Randall, according to The Information. Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel has since taken on more of the COO responsibility and the company is still currently hiring for a head of sales.

This article was written by Lara O’Reilly ([email protected]) from Business Insider and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.