Dive Brief:
- Snapchat is giving its Discover portal publisher partners a boost by allowing its users to subscribe to favorite channels.
- According to Re/code, it’s also going to replace Discover icons with an image that reflects each publishers' current content to create a more visual and clickable picture.
- Snapchat expects to begin allowing Discover channel subscriptions in May.
Dive Insight:
From the user’s perspective, subscribing to a Discover publisher would mean that content would appear on the Stories page, a quicker location to reach within the app’s user experience. Currently Snapchat promotes some Discover channels on the Stories page each day, but to find most of that content users have to specifically navigate to the Discover portal page.
Re/code suggests that Snapchat might be laying the groundwork to expand beyond the current limit of 20 Discover partners. By allowing for subscriptions there would be less competition for the limited main screen real estate that the article's author described as "a digital version of 'The Hunger Games.'" Users could get content from the publishers they want to see directly to their Stories page when the subscriptions kick in.
According to sources who spoke with Re/code, most publisher traffic currently comes from the Stories page rather than the Discover portal. Snapchat last summer rolled out a new layout that promoted branded content in the Stories section of the Discover tab. The messaging app has also made other concessions to publishers including allowing them to link out to content outside of the app.
Though Snapchat hasn't always been known to be especially publisher-friendly, publishers will likely embrace updates that help them get in front of Snapchat’s desirable millennial- and Gen-Z-heavy audience.
