Discord seems to be on the verge of rolling out its own form of advertisements in the form of ‘Sponsored Quests’ this week. According to Wall Street Journal, the gaming-centric voice and text chat app will feature paid promotions that will show up on the bottom-left corner of the UI.
As part of the Sponsored Quests program, Discord users will be prompted to play and stream specific games on Discord, and in the process earn in-game rewards. The program was initially tested out last year during a Star Wars-themed event on May 4 in Fortnite.
Discord’s senior vice president of product Peter Sellis has stated that players will have the option to disable personalised promotions by opting out through Discord’s settings. However, these promotions will still be visible through specific windows in the Discord app.
“Users may still see Quests, however, if they navigate to their Gift Inventory and/or through contextual entry points like a user’s friends’ activity,” says Discord’s senior product communications manager Swaleha Carlson. “They’ll also have the option to hide an in-app promotion for a specific Quest or game they’re not interested in.”
The new program, essentially a more engagement-focused advertising campaign, goes starkly against Discord’s own historic aversion to advertising. Former Instagram executive Meghana Dhar told WSJ that Discord could potentially start alienating its users with this new ad-focused program.
The platform “has famously promoted itself as committed to being ad-free, so this step-change could impact user trust and potentially have them looking for alternative platforms,” said Dhar.
