Snapchat Struggled to Sell Ads Because Its Users Were Too Young, Its Camera Had No Room, and It Was a Messaging App
Its users were too young to track, its camera left no room for ads, and its chats were never built for selling.
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · 90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord’s product chief | Peter SellisSnapchat did almost everything an advertiser would not want, and almost everything a teenager would want. That is the explanation from Peter Sellis, the first product lead at Snapchat who later ran product at Discord, for why one of the most popular apps among young Americans took so long to turn attention into ad dollars.
The first problem was age. Snapchat caught on fast with Generation Z, the people born roughly from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, and now with even younger kids aging out of games like Roblox. Sellis says there is a sharp drop in the price advertisers will pay between 17 and 18, and another jump between 18 and 21. The reason is measurement. Rules that limit how companies can track and target people under 18, rules he says are justified to protect teenagers, make it much harder to prove that an ad worked. An audience that is hard to measure is hard to build high performing ad products around, which made Snapchat's users less valuable to advertisers than the older crowds on Pinterest, Instagram, or Twitter.
The second problem was the camera. Most display ads, meaning picture and video ads that are not tied to a search query, open to the screen where the ads go, where they can get the most views. Snapchat opens to a camera. That makes it "the fastest way to capture a moment and share it with your friends," as Sellis put it, but there is no natural pause in that flow for an ad. It is a tool for making things, not for sitting back and consuming things, and Sellis says the company tried many ways to sell ads inside that creative moment. He calls his failure to make the camera pay one of his biggest failures.
The third problem was chatting. At its core, Snapchat is a messaging app, and Sellis says there is still no great ad format for messaging. Even the Asian chat apps often held up as successes look weak, he says, when judged by dollars earned per minute spent. Messaging apps are useful but hard to sell ads in.
Questions people ask
Why exactly are teenage users worth less to advertisers?
Advertisers pay for proof, not just views. They want to know that a 16-year-old who saw a sneaker ad later bought the sneakers, and privacy rules limit the tracking that connects those two events. Without that link, advertisers bid less because they cannot be sure the ad worked.
Where do Snapchat ads actually appear, then?
Most apps sell attention in a feed, where an ad can slide in between posts without breaking the experience. In a camera that opens ready to shoot and send, any interruption feels like getting in the way.
Why has no messaging app cracked advertising?
Messaging feels private and purposeful, so people tolerate fewer interruptions there than in a public feed. The most successful chat businesses tend to charge companies for customer service accounts, payments, or subscriptions instead of inserting ads between personal messages.