Dive Brief:
- With an eye on improving the user experience as well as boosting publisher views, Snapchat rolled out anticipated changes to its app design and, perhaps more importantly, has made it possible for users to subscribe to individual publisher channels.
- The new look for its Discover portal that swaps out branded icons for a tiled look that features headlines for the current content offered by each publisher.
- One reason for the redesign is that although Snapchat has 150 million daily users, Discover publishers might only get one million views a day, according to Bloomberg.
Dive Insight:
The redesign benefits Snapchat, its publisher partners and marketers alike because the Discover channels are the easiest way for marketers to tap into the app's coveted younger audience. Both Discover publishers and Snapchat would like to increase that ad revenue. On a platform where users are viewing some 10 billion daily videos, for publishers, the possibility of increased viewership on the messaging app makes the time-consuming venture worth the investment.
Another element of the redesign is combining the Discover portal tiles with Snapchat’s Live Stories that draw tens of millions of viewers at times. For marketers without the budget to run one-day Sponsored Lens campaigns -- that reportedly cost as much as $750,000 -- being able to purchase more basic video or display ads that run on Discover channel content is more feasible.
Venture Beat first reported about the new "magazine stand" like Discover portal look several weeks ago. The overall goal is to drive more traffic to Discover, both through the new subsriptions and the updated image-heavy look.
According to Reuters, Snapchat recently received a new funding round of $1.81 billion.
