Snapchat Partners With Media Companies to Launch “Discover”

Snapchat is one of the fastest growing social media platforms today, and is particularly attractive to advertisers because a significant portion of its users are Millennials. Building upon this momentum, Snapchat announced the arrival of its long-awaited “Discover” feature on January 27, 2015. Discover is one the biggest updates yet for Evan Spiegel’s four-year-old startup company.

Snapchat’s Discover is the result of a collaborative effort with some of the grandest names in the media industry, such as CNN, ESPN, Yahoo News, and National Geographic, among others. This feature is said to provide news to Snapchat users in the form of Snapchat Stories. While the goal is to bring the most relevant information to users, Snapchat emphasized that Discover is distinct from social media platforms like Facebook, which often identify the importance of news based on clicks and shares.

“Social media companies tell us what to read based on what’s most recent or most popular. We see it differently. We count on editors and artists, not clicks and shares, to determine what’s important,” Snapchat said in the announcement. It added, “Discover is different because it has been built for creatives. All too often, artists are forced to accommodate new technologies in order to distribute their work. This time we built the technology to serve the art: each edition includes full screen photos and videos, awesome long form layouts, and gorgeous advertising.”

The surge of companies wanting to partner with Snapchat is quite overwhelming, but it’s not entirely surprising either. In a report published by The New York Post a day before the Discover launch, the site claimed that Snapchat now has 100 million users around the globe. Snapchat’s main demographic remains young people aged 13-23, making it a hot platform for publishers and advertisers wanting to reach Millennials.

According to Re/code, Snapchat will sell ads through Discover and share the revenue with the respective publishers. When asked for a comment, a Snapchat representative reportedly chose to keep silent about the topic.

Stories published through Discover will be divided into sections, enabling media companies to put together a narrative, complete with a beginning, a middle, and an end. As usual, each story will last for a total of 24-hours before disappearing.

Users can open an edition of Discover everyday by simply swiping left to browse Snaps or swiping up on a Snap for more.

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