Snapchat users have long been known to be a creative bunch.

But recently the company has tried to appeal directly to those creative instincts as it announced it was opening up its geofilters feature to everyone.

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Geofilters are illustrations that can be overlaid onto photos while in specific locations. It's a feature the company has been experimenting with for some time, though it wasn't available to all users until last week's update.

Since then, users have created hundreds of their own specialized illustrations for the app tied to places such as schools, parks, zoos, campgrounds or even entire cities.

As with Snapchat's other filters, users access them by swiping across a photo. In places where geofilters are available, the illustrations will appear after users have scrolled through the other available options.

Snapchat user-created geofilters for Cape Cod and The Everglades. Image: Snapchat

Prior to the update, Snapchat's designers— who have so far made 800 filters for locations across the globe— were tasked with creating the location-based illustrations. But, as evidenced by this conversation between CEO Evan Spiegel and French Snapchat user Louis Malfoy, Snapchat was rapidly getting more interest in the feature than it could keep up with.

@Louis_Malfoy @Snapchat draw one and we'll put it up :) — Evan Spiegel (@evanspiegel) November 18, 2014

@evanspiegel @Snapchat What about that for a possible icon filter for Paris ? pic.twitter.com/rnRICoi97T — Louis Malfoy (@Louis_Malfoy) November 18, 2014

Through his conversation with Spiegel, Malfoy did end up making one and chronicled on Medium, how the official Paris geofilter came about, saying he quickly sketched it out following the Twitter conversation.

Malfoy's Paris geofilter. Image: Louis Malfoy

To be clear, Snapchat does enforce its own guidelines for user-created geofilters, which need to be associated with a specific "public place, neighborhood, landmark, venue or other location where people are likely to gather and send Snaps" and can't contain anything other than original illustrations.

Once submitted, filters still need to go through an approval process, though Snapchat tells us about one out of every five filters has been pushed through the app so far. But opening up geofilters to its community is also a strategic move for the company as Snapchat plans to roll out a version of the feature to businesses. Exactly how those partnerships will work isn't yet clear, but it stands to open a new— and likely lucrative— source of revenue for the company.

Allowing businesses to create their own geofilters would be a new type of native advertising companies could take advantage of to reach the app's 100 million monthly active users.

User-created Snapchats for Chicago's Botanical Garden and Kresge College at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Image: Snapchat

Think of it this way, a local restaurant could pay for a geofilter tied to a nearby tourist attraction, which could help draw in customers who may be otherwise unaware of it. Or an online retailer, say, Zappos, could pay for geofilters at local malls. Again, it's not clear if this is how Snpachat plans to implement the feature out to businesses, but it's not difficult to imagine scenarios where online and brick and mortar businesses would pay to be able to reach large numbers of Snapchat users at once.

This targeted approach would be similar to the company's strategy around live events. Earlier this year, Snapchat expanded its "Our Story" feature, which takes a similarly curated approach to live events with many users submitting videos to one publicly available video stream. Reports later surfaced the company was in talks with marketers to create targeted ads for those videos.

Snapchat is still in the relatively early stages of nailing down its business model. Citing the need to make money following a massive valuation, Snapchat just began to serve up its first ads in October and later partnered with Square on a payments feature that lets users send money to each other from within the app.