Discord has advertisements?

What a sensationalist headline! Now you've clicked this article, I'm going to spend the rest of it explaining why this headline has a BIG question mark at the end (which is disappointingly lacking in other publications).

Discord has a storied history with in-app endorsements, promotions and sponsors. In this article, we're going to break down many different promotions Discord has ran inside of their app, starting way back in 2016.

[2016] Discord GameBridge

Way back in the twilight years of Vine, Discord decided to dip their toes directly into games. At this time, Discord's identity was solidly that of "the app for Gamers!" (much like modern-day opera GX). To this end, Discord cooked up GameBridge. This feature allowed developers to integrate Discord's own VoIP & chat system into their games, bridging the gap between Discord & the games you play. A handful of studios made games compatible with this feature, including Unearned Bounty. Some of these games were directly promoted by Discord on the GameBridge, marking one of the very first times Discord has endorsed 3rd party content that integrates directly with Discord.

Is this an advertisement? Users aren't being shown this with in-app toasts, but it sure is right there, on the front of the GameBridge page.

[2018] Discord Game Store & GameSDK

GameBridge walked so the GameSDK could run. A complete re-build of the now outmoded GameBridge, the Game SDK surfaced even more powerful features for developers to integrate with Discord - But also to sell their games directly from the Discord app. This marks a milestone, this isn't Discord linking out to third parties anymore, this is Discord directly selling goods with a 10% cut from all sales. This means Discord has a direct financial incentive to sell these games.

So, is this where you draw the line? Discord is profiting from any in-app media that drives purchases of these games. But it's cordoned in it's own tab, does that mean it's just another feature, or are the featured games being advertised to you in-app? Well, one game stood out from all the rest:

King of the Hat

First on Discord, King of the Hat was directly promoted and tied to an in-app event with Discord's Hypesquad houses. The game was free-to-play, so there's no obvious financial incentive for Discord, other than the increased traffic through the Game Store.

This event ran for a short time, with the winning house getting a special variant of their Hypesquad badge (the one with the hat). Interestingly, the Balance house has won every single event of this type to date.

So, now Discord has tied an externally developed and owned - but internally distributed - game to a limited feature inside of Discord. While it's aesthetic only, there's no denying the incentive. Does this make King of the Hat the first thing Discord has advertised?

[2021] sticker packs

In 2021, Discord first experimented with Sticker Packs. This was a very early iteration of Discord's current sticker system, where stickers were sold in packs vs stickers being uploaded to Discord servers. Innersloth was an early partner for this iteration of Stickers, directly selling Among Us (sus!!) themed stickers inside of Discord. It's unknown if Discord took a cut of proceeeds.

This is an in-app purchase, exclusively for something usable within Discord, that has been provided by a third party. In surfacing this to users, is Discord advertising it? Is this just another feature that happens to have 3rd party content?

[2022] Server Discovery

Grab your compass, because Discord servers are Discoverable now! But who should Discord show on the front page? This surface started off as a curated place for specific servers, but quickly changed to be algorithmic due to the lift required to curate it. A couple of these servers are standout, notably OpenAI and Midjourney. Both of these servers are for large companies with paid services, in Midjourney's case, the service is even exclusive to Discord.

So, with these services effectively being featured on Discord's server discovery, is this an advertisement? These servers are being surfaced due to their online user count, so this is more of an organic endorsement, vs the carefully curated discovery:

Is there more of an argument to be made that these curated servers are being advertised vs those that have earned their sport organically? Do you think it's better for Discord to present servers on stats alone vs curating them? let us know in the comments!

It's worth noting that Midjourney, being Discord exclusive, naturally had a drastically inflated member count, which had to be manually allowed to increase by Discord (with the previous hard-cap being 1,000,000 members). This also means their online count will be higher. Is it fair to call Midjourney's user growth organic? How many of those accounts are used once and never again?

[2022] App Directory

In 2022, Discord announced another Discovery surface, the App Directory! As part of this launch, Discord had to choose some apps to feature right there on the front page. Below is the App Directory at launch, each of these apps was developed in collaboration with Discord, to ensure high quality and high brand power apps were being shown at launch.

This continues the discussion from the Server Discovery feature. Is this an advertisement? StockX, SoundCloud and Netflix all offer some paid goods or services, which their apps will remind you of. Hell, SoundCloud even sent out a mass-DM to solicit user feedback. But what about the big boy at the top?

Midjourney

PARTNER. What does that mean in terms of an app? This is the only time Discord has ever marked an app as a partner. The likely reason is Midjourney relied on Discord's CDN to show the images generated by it's app. Discord, understandably, doesn't like it when you use their CDN. Especially not at scale. So, there had to be some sort of agreement between Midjourney and Discord to both allow this usage and promote the Midjourney Bot on the front page of the App Directory (where it remained for the better part of a year). Discord even made a Case Study on it!

While there is no concrete info on the specifics of agreements between the two entities (though there's additional reporting that suggests Discord took a revenue cut from Midjourney), it's clear that the AI hype around this time was driving traffic to Discord for Midjourney. If Discord signed Midjourney into platform exclusivity, an advertisement for Midjourney would be one for their own platform. I just used the word advertisement, so is this the line?

[2023] Quests

Ah we're all caught up! But wait, that's not valorant? And didn't this just release? That's what all the headlines say!

Well. The headlines are wrong. Discord first trialled the Quests system (formerly Drops) with Fortnite in May of 2023. Discord would show this notification if you started playing Fortnite, and you were incentivised to stream it to unlock exclusive content within Fortnite.

So, is this the final bastion of advertising? It's not invasive, nothing is being sold, and you gain something external to Discord much like Discord's nitro promotions (which we will cover shortly). But this isn't the current iteration of Quests, you're here for...

Valorant

What makes this one Different? In-app purchases. Discord is selling these limited-time cosmetics, alongside sponsored popups (like the one shown for Fortnite) inside Discord. This combines two concepts we've seen prior, the previous iteration of Quests and cosmetics akin to the Sticker Packs feature. On their own, I'm not eager to say either is an "Advertisement". So why should things change when combined?

So, is this popup an ad? We can see the Sponsored disclaimer, we know that in the case of Valorant's partnership it's providing access to otherwise costly IAPs. So, is this an advertisement?

What about the current iteration of Discord's Quests? Here's what Quests surface as in-app:

With this, we're all caught up. Discord is planning to keep Quests rolling into the future starting with the free-to-play The Finals. 8 years of content, and (in my opinion) still no clear answer on where the line is for an advertisement. But wait... I'm missing something...

Nitro

Now this is something Discord has been directly profiting from for years and constantly promotes in-app AND on their blog/socials with corporate partnerships. So, why has there been no headlines calling these Nitro promotions advertisements?

Discord even surfaces many of their promotions directly on their blog. There's no question they're promotions and there's no question Discord profits from them. Checkmate?

What is advertising?

Well, here's a Legal Definition:

Advertising is the act or practice of attracting public notice and attention. It includes all forms of public announcement that are intended to aid directly or indirectly in the furtherance or promulgation of an idea, or in directing attention to a business, commodity, service or entertainment.

Not satisfied? Here's the dictionary definition:

the activity or profession of producing advertisements for commercial products or services."an advertising agency"

And of Advertisements:

a notice or announcement in a public medium promoting a product, service, or event or publicizing a job vacancy.

So... Everything we've mentioned is an advertisement? Even Discord's changelogs are arguably advertisements under these incredibly broad definitions so... Why don't they feel like advertisements?

It's not about the law.

The issue here is emotional. Discord has long shirked the concept of advertisements on their platform in favour of alternate revenue streams. Over the past year, efforts in this area have ramped up with Discord announcing Embedded Apps, App Subscriptions, Server Subscriptions and more. In 2021, Discord announced the hiring of a CFO, this sparked discussions of a potential IPO. With Reddit going down this route, it's not hard to imagine Discord is gearing up to do the same.

Every company needs to make money eventually, Discord is a company. It's easy to forget that the internet isn't free, everything has a cost and the platforms you use are beholden to their shareholders just as much as (if not more than) they're beholden to users.

The recent addition of the Valorant IAPs & Quests system marks a step Discord has perceptually made towards shareholders and a potential IPO, and away from users. But it's just that, perceptual. As we've broken down, Discord isn't doing anything new, this isn't a first step and this isn't the end of an ad-free Discord. Because, after all this, Discord lets you simply opt out.