Earlier this year, we ran an article discussing the ridiculously high amount Snapchat was asking for in terms of advertising on its popular mobile application. However, it appears that isn’t stopping some companies from hopping on board with Snapchat’s latest program, Discover.
Re/code has reported that the ad pricing for the program is running somewhere in the vicinity of $100 for every thousand views – something that can pick up incredibly quickly considering the popularity of Discover. Still, some companies have bought in due to the popularity, like mobile company Alibaba, who invested $200 million into the service.
Other partners have hopped on board as well, including CNN, Vice and ESPN, despite the high asking price for advertising. But with the deal, Snapchat seems to pay off with a guaranteed view count to ad buyers based on traffic patterns established over the previous few weeks. Publishers can demand anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 a day for content as a result, but with the 500,000 to one million views per day, it seems pay off in the long run, with so many eyes on advertising.
The program is experimental thus far, since Discover is still a new property. But there’s still a safety margin put in place for companies and marketers to try it out. For example, if the publisher gets fewer views than what was initially guaranteed, they will run the ads for longer than the 24-hour time frame that was originally paid for, until the number count is reached.
There’s quite an audience with the Discover app, between teens and millennials that can’t usually be reached through other apps or social networks, and even without the ability to create referral traffic (linking back to a company’s original website), there’s still plenty of buzz behind a product.
Yes, the pricing remains higher than usual, but it appears Snapchat is going all out to assure companies that it’s worth it. We’ll see how the Discover program fares as it rolls along through 2015.
