Discord has announced tools aimed at expanding the number and types of companies that advertise on the platform.

This week, the social media firm announced Discord Ads Manager, an ad campaign management platform that lets companies manage ads shown on Discord in one place. The tool can be used to perform forecasting, build “a campaign with objective-based bidding,” and monitor an ad campaign’s performance, according to the announcement.

“Self-service access extends Discord advertising to smaller studios and marketers that previously needed a direct sales relationship to run campaigns, opening the platform to advertisers, regardless of their budget,” Discord said.

The ads manager is currently available to select advertisers, but self-service access won’t come until “early 2027,” Discord said.

The company is also expanding Video Quests, video ads Discord users can watch to get in-game rewards. Discord has been showing these ads to browsers in a beta format, with limited testing on Discord’s mobile apps. The company announced that the ad format is now called Video Quests Reserve and will serve as “a premium, reservation-based offering designed for high-impact brand moments.” The ads will give “advertisers a scalable, always-on way to drive outcomes, such as impressions and clicks.” Discord will offer advertisers additional objectives to track “soon.”

The updated video ads and Discord Ads Manager will lead to “expanded [user] targeting,” Discord said.

Discord’s ad ventures

Discord debuted in 2015 and didn’t have ads until 2024, when it launched Quests. The social media company’s ad ventures relate to its confidential IPO filing in January, according to a Bloomberg report at the time that cited anonymous “people familiar with the matter.” The advertising push is seen as a way to drive Discord’s value beyond premium subscription offerings and game sales.

Users should expect Discord to introduce more ad types in the future, based on comments from Discord Global VP of Advertising Adam Bauer to GamesBeat this week.

“Moving forward, we’re going to continue to invest in formats and features across all of those parts, whether you’re in an upper-funnel, brand-awareness lifecycle or you’re at the very bottom and you’re trying to actually get people to install your app or drive purchases on your platform,” he said, “so just making Discord more accessible to businesses of any size and giving them more ways to turn engagement into results.”

As Discord touts its growing advertising business, some users are wary of the changes. Ads may be necessary for the platform to remain financially viable and free, but users are concerned that ads and other recent changes, including age verification and AI moderation, could fundamentally change the platform.

Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy addressed these concerns in an interview with Engadget last year.

“I’m definitely the one who’s constantly bringing up enshittification [at internal meetings]. It’s not a bad thing to build a strong business and to monetize a product. That’s how we can reinvest and continue to make things better. But we have to be extremely thoughtful about how we do that,” he said.

So far, Discord’s ads could be considered minimally intrusive since they come in the form of small pop-ups in the lower part of the screen and clickable sidebars that only expand with user interaction.

Should these ads become more aggressive, including in size or frequency, the company could quickly lose longtime users.