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Snapchat is sneaking ads between your friends' Stories

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Snapchat

The time has finally come: Snapchat is going to start showing you ads between your friends' Stories.

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The vertical video ads you see in Discover and Snapchat's Live Stories will be shown when you watch Stories from people you're friends with in the app. 

Snapchat declined to say how often ads will be shown, but a spokesperson confirmed that they would be skippable and will only appear between Stories. That means they won't be jarringly placed between the individual snaps that make up a single Story.

Snapchat's three kinds of advertising: Lenses, Geofilters, and video 'Snap Ads'

Snapchat face swap
Snapchat's Lenses let you face swap with pictures in your camera roll and create other fun effects. Advertisers are increasingly paying for branded Lenses. Tech Insider

Snapchat has been successful so far with advertising in the main messaging component of its service. The company's popular selfie Lenses have been used for sponsored campaigns that turn people into virtual X-Men characters and giant taco heads. 

Snapchat's recent taco Lens (which was sponsored by Taco Bell, of course) was viewed 224 million times in the app over a 24-hour period. Snapchat says that the average Snapchatter plays with a Sponsored Lens for 20 seconds before sending.

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Anyone can also pay to place custom geofilters inside Snapchat, which other users can overlay on their messages from a specific location.

How Snapchat's 150 million daily users react to video ads between Stories remains to be seen. Sponsored Lenses and Geofilters are optional by design — you have to choose to interact with them. But seeing ads in what has always been an ad-free experience (watching your friends' Stories) is something else entirely.

Snapchat now auto-plays Stories from people you follow, so the whole experience of watching Stories could end up feeling more like TV with content you want to watch and ads sprinkled throughout.

For now, Snapchat appears to be relatively cautious about how many ads it plans to show. "By doing this the right way, focused on creativity and doing it early, it allows us to be extraordinarily conservative," Snapchat head of revenue product Peter Sellis told Adweek.

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Hollister, P&G, Verizon, Warner Brothers, and several other companies will start advertising between Snapchat Stories with video ads soon.

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