Discord to Roll Out Sponsored Advertisements Starting Next Week

Discord will start showing advertisements to everyone from next week, marking a change to their long standing policy of avoiding their use for revenue.

According to an article published by WSJ, the social media platform will tailor their advertisement targeting to  users’ age, location data, and game play. Users will be able to opt out of personalized promotions for Quests.

The article also says that Discord is plaaning to hire more than a dozen people for advertisement sales positions, despite their previous stance against sponsored advertisements on the platform.

In a blog post released in March 2024, Senior Vice President Peter Sellis had revealed their plans to implement more advertisements in the form of “Sponsored Quests” which would grant users rewards for streaming specific games to their friends.

This comes after they had tested the feature in May 2023 with Epic Games and Lucasfilm Games. Users could obtain a Star Wars themed weapon skin by streaming Fortnite to at least one friend for 15 minutes.

Despite becoming a permanent addition to the platform, the developers have promised that all quests will be opt-in only and will hang out unobtrusively at the bottom-left of the screen.

No information has been revealed as to whether Nitro users’ experience will be affected by Sponsored Quests.