Seeking to boost its e-commerce business and provide creators with new ways to monetize their work, Snapchat has announced that it is set to launch beta tests for mid-roll ads in Snap Star Stories. Snap Stars are popular content creators (celebrities and other big names) with verified accounts and a large, highly engaged audience of followers, whose each story gets at least 50,000 views. According to Snapchat, this new feature will benefit all parties involved, as the mobile messaging app will share ad revenues with its creators.
Exactly how much money the most popular Snapchat users will make from having mid-roll ads in their Stories will be determined by a formula that accounts for things like publication frequency and engagement rate. For now, the company is only rolling out the new feature for a few select US-based Snap Stars. However, Snap Stars that are not a part of the beta testing will not have to wait long to try it. Snapchat promises to open mid-roll ads to all Snap Stars by the end of the year. The platform is not a stranger to earning from ads, but it is the first time it will let users get a share of ad profits on Stories.
While the company expects the feature to be profitable, the truth is that people no longer spend that much time posting or browsing Stories on Snapchat. Instead, they prefer to enjoy short videos on Spotlight, which is a Snapchat-owned analog of TikTok.
It remains to be seen whether Snapchat's mid-roll ads on Stories will indeed make it easier for the app and its popular creators to achieve financial success or if it will fail to compete with the current popularity of TikTok-style content on Spotlight.
Do you like watching content creator stories on the Snapchat app? Are you a creator yourself? Feel free to tell us what you think in the comments below!
