Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
As Discord’s budding romance with brands and advertisers continues, the platform has hired its first-ever chief commercial officer to expand its commerce and partnership business.
Jules Shumaker, Discord’s new CBO, comes to the company with more than two decades of in-game advertising experience. She most recently served as the company’s CRO Unity between 2021 and 2024; prior to Unity, she worked as vice president of advertising for game publisher Zynga. Her first day as Discord’s CBO was January 6th.
Shumaker’s entry comes at an opportune time for Discord. The company has established itself as the dominant text and voice chat platform for the gaming community hired a team experienced platform and game managers to launch its first ad product Play Quests in March 2024. In October of last year, Discord launched its second advertising product, Video Quests. Both are rewarded ad formats – ads that reward users in-app in exchange for their engagement and attention – that encourage Discord users to play a certain game or engage in other activities to earn digital rewards on the platform, such as profile overlays pictures. .
To learn more about Shumaker’s plans to help build Discord’s commerce business, Digiday spoke with the company’s incoming CBO for a commentary Q&A.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
On Discord’s decision to focus its ad products on endemic game advertisers
Jules Shumaker: “I think the most powerful ad format in media is the reward-based ad format. At its core, it’s a game changer for Discord: that we have a player base that is completely geared towards this mechanic. That’s what drives them – achievements, achievements, winning rewards. This format works for every advertiser in the world; there isn’t a category it won’t work for.
The point is, for that core player base that loves us, we’re a place to chat and play before, during, and after games — and that requires a pace of adoption from endemic to non-endemic. We could open it up to everyone right now and be wildly financially successful; I don’t think we have an economic decision at all. But the player is at the epicenter and people want to see and participate in what is relevant to them. As we scale and find out what works for our player base, that will determine how wide and how fast we go.”
Digiday: Discord’s Quests represent direct business partnerships between Discord and advertisers or agencies; they are not sold programmatically or through self-service purchase. In this context, the endemic brands are game publishers, who make up the majority of advertisers using the Quests platform. In November 2024, Discord’s advertising business expanded into film and television with Video Quest promoting the HBO series “Dune: Prophecy”. So far, however, the platform has not made its ad products available to any brands or advertisers outside of gaming or media and entertainment. Discord’s revenue currently stands at about $600 million, according to reports Bloomberg last year.
Shumaker’s response made it clear that Discord is taking steps to maintain its core identity as a gaming platform, despite the potential revenue that could come from expanding its ad offering into other areas. Although Shumaker didn’t draw any explicit comparisons between Discord and other platforms, her response suggests that Discord may be taking cues from the past expansion of the ad business of other platforms aimed at gaming communities, such as Twitch, which has lost some of its influence on players because it attracted non-endemic advertisers in 2022 and 2023.
About Discord’s aggressive approach to low prices for its ad products
Jules Shumaker: “In the early days of any business that I grew up in, pricing is the starting place, which is trial and error, A/B testing. When you’re big, setting is just a matter of return on ad spend – it’s actually super easy. Just look at AppLovin’s advertising business, right? They don’t have to find out the price; the marketplace will determine the price.
Right now we are at a stage where we are not limited by demand or supply. We are in a testing limitation that moves us up the stairs to the right path of growth. For me, it requires some aggressive pricing to try. I think we left a lot on the table and that’s actually part of it. Sometimes being a good fit means you have these swings, and then, occasionally, the advertiser benefits heavily from our understatement, and other times we see that maybe we’ve gone too far.”
Digiday: Discord’s advertising products are currently offered at a fixed price based on projections of reach and frequency, brand impact and overall user engagement with each Quest, according to a Discord representative, who declined to disclose specific rates but said Discord sells its premium inventory with CPMs ranging from roughly $25 to $30 depending on variables such as format, region, and reach. Discord is pricing on CPM instead of cost-per-action because both views and interactions with Quests provide value to advertisers and because it’s “the right economic model for Discord,” according to a representative, who said the pricing was “competitively positioned within the premium price tier of inventory and at the same time staying below the most expensive platforms.”
While advertising is a promising potential revenue stream for Discord, it’s clear that it remains a relatively experimental business unit for the company until 2025. Currently, most of Discord’s revenue comes from Discord Nitro, the platform’s premium subscription plan.
“Part of any leader in Discord’s role is to care deeply about the value of supporting Nitro and the player that is the foundation of that business experience,” said Shumaker. “I’m certainly not responsible for Nitro. as chief commercial officer, it is not directly within my competence. But it’s indirectly within my competence.”
About potential plans to continue staffing Discord’s sales and partner teams
Jules Shumaker: “It is a relatively small team where my ambitions are not yet focused on numbers or pace of recruitment. Note: Having business-to-business access to the developer community is very new to Discord. This is a great opportunity for us to get serious about developer relations; how do we help them succeed in their business?
[Discord vp of sales] Adam [Bauer] and I complement each other perfectly, right? He’s more than capable of doing the ad rounds and I’ll focus more on the things that matter to game publishers and developers. He has quickly built a team that feels properly equipped and feels genuinely engaged with the opportunity.”
Digiday: Although Shumaker emphasized that she doesn’t have a specific hiring goal for 2025, Discord is building out its advertising team. Currently, its sales and partnerships team has roughly 40 members, according to a Discord representative. Discord is currently hiring for at least five roles specifically related to advertising, including advertising account manager he intended to “build and grow a new, fast-growing business line at Discord”. Other open advertising roles at the company include a software engineering lead position advertisements and advertising infrastructureas well as a product marketing manager for advertising solutions and Head of Lifecycle Marketing.