Snapchat's Live Stories feature can reportedly make $400,000 from 10-second ads

Snapchat's Live Stories, a feature where users can share photos and videos of a live event, is turning out to be quite a lucrative business for the ephemeral messaging app.

Snapchat charges marketers two cents per view on a 10-second ad that shows up on one of the Live Stories contents, according to a report in Recode citing anonymous sources. Since Live Stories can attract about 20 million people on average in a 24-hour span, that means ad space on a 20 million view story can be worth about $400,000, Recode said.

Seeing that potential, Snapchat is doubling down on Live Stories. It now has more than 40 human curators working as part of the Live Story team (from less than 10 in January), and features "multiple events per day," as opposed to one or two per week in January.

"It's still a relatively new product and we've been focused on content [so far] but I think you're going to see a lot more ads in the future," Ben Schwerin, Snapchat's director of partnerships told Recode.

Snapchat, which last raised funding at a valuation of $16 billion, sees Live Stories as one of the big growth drivers of its business. Since its launch about a year ago, Live Stories has provided unique experiences to its users, becoming one of Snapchat's most popular features. The music festival Coachella, for example, attracted more than 40 million unique viewers, Recode said.