Dive Brief:
- Refinery29 became the 15th channel in the Snapchat Discover portal, but at the expense of Snapchat’s own original content channel, Snap.
- Snapchat has hired some notable figures in an effort to become a media company as well as a social networking platform, but this new move looks to put those plans on hold.
- Snapchat isn’t alone in failing to make the leap from publishing platform to content publisher – see: Facebook “Stories” and Tumblr’s “Storyboard.”
Dive Insight:
This week Snapchat added Refinery29 to its Discovery portal, joining the likes of BuzzFeed, IGN, iHeartRadio, Cosmopolitan, People and ESPN. The new addition, however, came at a personal cost for Snapchat. In order to make room for Refinery29 and its largely millennial female audience, the messaging app dropped its own original content channel, Snap, from the portal.
“To me, this is about ceasing operation on a unit that is competing with the creativity of its user base – a losing proposition,” Vivian Schiller, digital media consultant and former head of news at Twitter, told Digiday. “You can hire the smartest visual storytellers in the world, and they will be outmatched by the talent that mobile storytelling tools have unleashed on the general population.”
In creating Snap, Snapchat hired Marcus Wiley from Fox Comedy and Pete Hamby from CNN as part of a 15-member team to create original content for Discover.
