Brief:

• Snapchat this week formed partnerships with 25 media companies to create daily content for its public Our Stories feature that collects in-app posts from users in a nearby community. The new Curated Our Stories will show posts that media companies create by combining their editorial work with publicly submitted user-generated content (UGC), per Adweek.
• CNN, NBC News, NowThis, Hearst, Viacom, Overtime, Refinery29 and Jukin Media are among Snapchat's media partners for the new feature. For the first time, Snap will give them access to its Our Stores API portal that previously was limited to its in-house team so that the media companies can add UGC to their posts.
• Snap will handle ad sales and share revenue with publishers, but not with the individual Snapchat users who post to Our Stories. Publishers also are allowed to embed the posts on their own websites and apps, per Digiday.

Insight:

Snapchat's new Curated Our Stories feature will expand its content offering to appeal to a wider audience, especially among young adults and teens that mobile marketers want to reach, while adding another revenue stream. The feature may also boost engagement among Snapchat users who get a fleeting chance at fame from posts that professional media companies add to their Stories and share with viewers. The Curated Our Stories features follows Snap's Stories Everywhere launch this year that let select Stories get shared on the web, where they could be searchable, per Variety.

Publishers may like the idea of creating Curated Our Stories that don't require extra resources or costs, unlike Discover content that needs dedicated teams of producers. CNN, as one example, discovered the difficulties of making money on Discover. In December, the news channel canceled a daily show called "The Update" after realizing there wasn't a clear path to profitability, per The Wall Street Journal.

For Snapchat, the Curated Our Stories feature gives the image-sharing app access to more content as the company seeks to regain user growth. Last month, parent company Snap said the app's user growth had declined for the first time, slipping 2% to 188 million in Q2 2018. Despite the drop in users, Snap's revenues rose 44% from a year earlier to $262.3 million and its losses narrowed to $353 million from $443 million in Q2 2017. 

Snapchat also has tried to expand its appeal among marketers with new features such as native commerce capabilities that let influencers earn money from products sold through their posts. Snap last year added self-service features like its Ad Manager tool to open its platform to a wider group of advertisers.