By Ryan Laffler, Account Manager

Four years ago, Snapchat burst onto the social media scene with a novel idea: an app that lets users share photos and videos that are only viewable for a limited amount of time (as of today, the range is from 1 to 10 seconds). The idea started out as a class project at Stanford University under the name Picaboo and has since exploded into a $20 billion behemoth.

Competitors like Facebook and Google have long allowed advertisers to target users on an incredibly granular level. By tracking, recording, and analyzing user behavior, companies like Facebook develop lifestyle profiles on their users that can then be selectively targeted by advertisers to ensure maximum relevancy and ROI. And it appears Snapchat wants in on the action.

For the past month, Snapchat has been letting advertisers buy consumer bundles that group users by theme: cultural, entertainment, etc. This strategy will not necessarily increase the number of ads on Snapchat but rather ensure that the ads are relevant to the specific user.

The practice of data mining, or “the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data, has come under fire over the past few years due to concerns over privacy. Share and tell us what you think of Snapchat’s new advertising strategy in the comments below!