Discord, a texting and voice chat platform in which people can launch their own chat groups has decided to start displaying advertisements. For now, the paid promotions will be from video game vendors, which is fitting since Discord is widely used among gamers.
Historically, Discord has used paid ‘Server Boosts’ and ‘Nitro’ subscriptions to provide extra features instead of showing users advertisements.
The advertisements will be displayed in the bottom left corner of the screen, and users will be able to turn them off (this most likely applies only to users with paid subscriptions). There will also be paid promotions for completing in-game tasks with at least one user watching.
The ads will be targeted based on users’ gameplay, age and location, which isn’t good news from a privacy standpoint (unless all the personal data being used for ad targeting remains on the users’ devices, but this is not a common practice).