With the rollout of Snap Ads Between Stories, Snapchat is promising once again to avoid pelting users with marketing messages. “By doing this the right way, focused on creativity and doing it early, it allows us to be extraordinarily conservative,” says Sellis. “Something that I think often gets lost is that ad effectiveness can be inversely correlated with the number of ads that the viewer sees. If you see 50 ads in a day, the probability of you remembering them is low.”
With this move, it’s clear that charing users $5 a year for an ad-free experience would mean the app would have never succeeded.