Snapchat to Charge Advertisers Two Cents Per View on Discover

Snapchat will now charge advertisers two cents per view for the 10-second ads that run in between articles and videos on its Discover platform, Snapchat's Nick Bell announced Thursday at a NewFront presentation for both DailyMail.com and EliteDaily.com. The product is aptly called Two Pennies. "It's a really, really simple product," he said. "It's a 10 second ad, two cents per view to reach a really engaged audience." Discover is a place inside the Snapchat app where users can read articles and watch videos from 11 media companies, including Daily Mail, CNN, ESPN, Vice and People. Snapchat users spend on average nine minutes a day on Daily Mail content in Discover, Mr. Bell said. Mr. Bell didn't explain what constitutes a view. Is an advertiser charged, for instance, when someone watches the full 10-second ad? Or is it following in the steps of Yahoo, which charges advertisers for a view after someone watches an ad for at least three seconds? A Snapchat spokeswoman didn't immediately respond to Ad Age's questions about the matter. Snapchat has spent the last several months experimenting with how to price ads on Discover, according to Mr. Bell. He didn't go into specifics about the pricing, but a report on Digiday said the app had been charging advertisers 15 cents a view for Discover ads. Publishers are responsible for selling ads against their Discover content and split a percentage of the revenue with Snapchat. "I think it's transformative," said Jon Steinberg, North American CEO at Daily Mail. He shared the stage with Mr. Bell and called Two Pennies "one of the great advertising products" -- in league, he claimed, with Google Adwords, YouTube's TruView and Facebook's sponsored updates. "We are ready to sell that immediately," added Mr. Steinberg, who's the former president of BuzzFeed. "We are ready to produce the creative." The Daily Mail-Elite Daily event was the last of this year's NewFronts, capping off two weeks of presentations from media companies pitching their digital video series to advertisers. The companies presented together because Daily Mail bought Elite Daily in January for a reported price of $40 to $50 million. Elite Daily prides itself on being a site created by millennials for millennials -- a word that was thrown around often during the NewFronts as a whole. Most of the videos previewed at Thursday's low-key NewFront were from Elite Daily, including an Artists in Residency program featuring young filmmakers who will make exclusive videos for the site. "We're very much an up and comer in this," Mr. Steinberg said, referring to both sites' nascent video efforts. The NewFront comes as the Daily Mail is trying to raise its profile among the advertising community to remedy what Mr. Steinberg has called the company's "Madison Avenue problem." That is, despite the size of its audience, the Daily Mail's ad revenue in the U.S. remains relatively low. During the company's last fiscal year, which ended in September 2014, the Daily Mail generated about $19 million in U.S. revenue, according to its U.K.-based parent company DMGT. Contributing: Tim Peterson

Snapchat to Charge Advertisers Two Cents Per View on Discover

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