Nobody wants to look at your boobs: Snapchat gets ads 'that interest you'

Snapchat has begun serving up adverts to its naked selfie despatching users in the USA.

The company said in a blog post on Friday that ads would debut for State-side netizens from today.

The messaging service was understood to be something of a haven for supposedly self-destructing naked selfies – until that is when around 200,000 of those snaps were allegedly snatched from a third party app and then leaked online.

Snapchat is following the well-worn model of other web app startups that launch a service, build up their userbase and then wrap their network in ad goo.

Unsurprisingly, Snapchat seems to have adopted the Mark Zuckerberg mantra, by paraphrasing the mighty boydroid.

"The best advertisements tell you more about stuff that actually interests you," Snapchat said.

The outfit then attempted to have a dig at data slurping giants such as Facebook by adding:

Some companies spend a lot of time and collect a lot of data about you to figure that out. The product we’re releasing today is a lot simpler. An advertisement will appear in your Recent Updates from time to time, and you can choose if you want to watch it. No biggie. It goes away after you view it or within 24 hours, just like Stories.

We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication – things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted. It’s nice when all of the brilliant creative minds out there get our attention with terrific content.

Snapchat appears to be suggesting that its time-limited ads are just as benign as other aspects of its supposedly self-destructing image service. But then, we've already seen how that turned out.

One thing we will say for Snapchat, it was honest enough to admit right up front why it was now tacking on ads to its service: "we need to make money," it said. ®