Revenue Head Randall Exits Snapchat

Could it have been the backlash over its non-negotiable asking price of $750,000 for a day of disappearing ads? Either way, Mike Randall is moving on after less than a year as Snapchat’s head of revenue.

Last summer, the social network proudly poached Randall from Facebook, where he served as global director of its Preferred Marketing Developer program.

The departure — first reported by Re/Code — comes at a bad time for Snapchat. Having recently raised an additional $500 million, the company is under intense pressure to start turning its popularity into profit.

Snapchat just introduced ads to its platform. Lke content in its "Stories" section, the ads disappear after users view them, or within 24 hours. Also, at least for the moment, Snapchat is promising not to put ads in users’ “personal communication” -- i.e., Snaps or Chats.

Yet, marketers are said to be laughing off Snapchat’s reportedly non-negotiable asking price of $750,000 for a day of disappearing ads.

While confirming Randall’s exit on Wednesday, a Snapchat spokeswoman said the company had no additional information to share at the moment. As yet, there is no word on Randall’s replacement, or his own plans for the future.

Taking another revenue approach, Snapchat recently waded into the peer-to-peer payments business in collaboration with Square Cash. To use its new Snapcash service, users need to volunteer their debit-card number on their smartphone, where the account information is held by Square.

Mobile payments are becoming big business, according to Forrester, which recently predicted that the total volume will almost triple from around $50 billion this year to $142 billion in 2019. Peer-to-peer payments are also expected to more than triple from $5.2 billion this year to $17 billion by 2019.

Threatening its standing as a secure platform, however, hackers recently intercepted hundreds of thousands of private user messages, which they promised to release to the public.

As such, it remains an open question whether users will trust Snapchat with their money.

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