First Snapchat Ad Ever Gives Users A Fright

First Snapchat Ad Ever Gives Users A Fright

Snapchat jumped into the ad game Saturday with its first-ever piece of sponsored content: a 20-second trailer for the new horror movie "Ouija."

It's unclear how many of the mobile app's users received the ad that appeared in the "Recent Updates" section normally reserved for friends' "Stories." If you received the trailer for the new Universal Studios movie, your Snapchat account looked something like this:

Before the ad showed up in Snapchat accounts, the company wrote a blog post informing users it was on its way.

"We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted," Snapchat wrote in the blog post Friday.

The company assured users the ad would disappear after 24 hours or after it was watched. "No biggie" if users didn't want to watch the ad at all, the blog post added.

Still, many users took to Twitter to express their surprise and frustration at the new ads.

That ouija ad on snapchat just scared the crap outta me😒😱

— Claudia Liu (@claudiatingya) October 19, 2014

The ad comes at a trying time for Snapchat. Some 200,000 Snapchat photos were recently leaked after hackers gained access to photos stored via a third-party app, Snapsaved.com. Snapsaved.com, which allows users to save Snapchats without the sender knowing, emphasized that Snapchat itself had not been hacked.

This is the first attempt Snapchat has made at cashing in on advertising dollars despite a July valuation of $10 billion. The reason for the ads is simple, the company wrote: "We need to make money."

If you missed it on Snapchat, here's a glimpse at what users saw of the movie "Ouija":

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