The social media platform is going to start rolling out “Sponsored Snaps” on the main chat tab, hinting that they we will appear above messages from your contacts.

The company’s CEO Evan Spiegel said in a memo that they will arrive “without a push notification, and opening the message is optional".

It is not yet known if users will have to open it or if they will be able to do it.

He said: “Sponsored Snaps empower advertisers to communicate visually with the Snapchat community, making the core functionality of Snapchat accessible to advertisers. As always, your conversations with friends are private and are not used for advertising purposes.”

It is believed this is happening as part of its response to its low stock price and being unable to turn its 850 million users into a profitable enterprise. The company - who been trading for 13 years - noted how they were lagging behind its biggest competitors, such as Meta’s Instagram and Threads.

Evan wrote: “You may be wondering why, with all of the progress we’ve made in our business over the last year, our share price performance has lagged the overall market. The answer is simple: our advertising business is growing slower than our competitors. The growth of our digital advertising business is one of the most important inputs to our long term revenue potential, and investors are concerned that we aren’t growing faster.”

Evan continued: “The way we grow our community is by enabling Snapping. Visual communication is at the heart of what we do, it’s universally appealing - fast, fun, and deeply expressive. Snapping brings people together in ways that no other medium of communication yet invented has been able to do, and in doing so makes people feel happier and closer to their friends and family.”