When Snapchat unveiled Discover, a place in the messaging app where media companies can publish original stories, one of the publishers that jumped to get onto the platform was the Web site Mashable.
Mashable quickly sank time and money into making daily videos and stories for Discover to appeal to Snapchat’s young audience. The work — which, like almost everything on Snapchat, disappeared after 24 hours — was costly for Mashable.
Even so, Mashable is today making money off Discover under a partnership with Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc, to sell ads alongside its videos and stories. Mashable now counts Discover as an important source of revenue.
Photo: Reuters
“Snap has given us a valuable, loyal, young audience of millions who can be hard to reach on other platforms,” Mashable chief content officer Greg Gittrich said. “It’s very profitable for us.”
Mashable’s experience illustrates how Discover has emerged as a bright spot for Snapchat and its parent company.
Discover’s performance is important as Snap, which had its initial public offering in March and is poised to deliver its first earnings as a public company tomorrow, has been under attack from Facebook Inc.
Facebook and its other apps, including the photo-sharing site Instagram, have systematically copied some of Snapchat’s features during the past year. Given Facebook’s immense size — it has 1.3 billion people who interact with the social network or one of its apps each day, compared with about 161 million users for Snapchat — investors are closely watching for whatever might keep Snap distinctive and give it a competitive edge.
Discover, which was introduced in 2015, might be part of the answer.
On Snapchat, Discover resembles a menu of channels, arranged by publisher brand. People can tap on any channel and leaf through that day’s set of stories and videos. More than 100 million Snapchat users view content on Discover each month, the company says.
Signs of success on Discover could help Snap reach more deals for original TV shows, an initiative the company has been building for many months. It could also help keep people loyal to Snapchat, even as the six-year-old company has acknowledged that user growth has been slowing.
Advertisers concerned about their ads running alongside questionable content might pay a premium to be on Discover.
“Our focus is to help our partners develop businesses that are financially significant, and sustainable, in turn funding future investment in quality storytelling,” Snap vice president of content Nick Bell said of Discover.
High-quality storytelling on Discover should also help build a highly engaged and loyal audience on Snapchat, he said.
Although Snapchat’s number of users is smaller than Facebook’s, publishers said they can still reach a lot of people on Discover.
Steven Kydd, a founder of Tastemade, a digital food and lifestyle publication, said his company gets more than 1 billion views a month on Discover and people do not just skip over the videos and stories — more than 28 percent of viewers in the US visit Tastemade’s Discover channel at least five days a week, he said, and his daily audience has grown more than 4.5 times as large over the past year.
As a result, Tastemade has created a studio it can use to make daily videos for Discover, which are produced in eight languages across three channels in the US, Britain and France.
Tastemade now generates a significant amount of revenue from Discover, said Kydd, who declined to say whether the effort was profitable.
To keep what appears on Discover distinctive, Snap has asked publishers not to overlap too much with one another. The messaging app requested that Mashable be a technology outlet on Discover, for example, even though Mashable covers an array of topics.
Snap has asked others to avoid tabloid-like fare that might increase the number of viewers for a single story at the expense of building a loyal audience.
Last year, Snap also cracked down on some risque content on Discover.
Discover is also evolving in other ways.
While it was originally known for lighter fare aimed at teenagers, Discover has expanded to more than 60 publishers, TV networks and studios from an initial 11, including news outlets such as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
Facebook might find it difficult to emulate what is on Discover.
In 2015, Snap wrote in a blog post that it would rely on “editors and artists, not clicks and shares, to determine what’s important.”
Discover has also prohibited fake and deceptive news outright, and allows only some publishers to produce stories each day, efforts that have attracted premium advertisers.
In contrast, Facebook users can share any article they wish, whether or not the material comes from reputable publications, and the company tries to rely on computers to decide who sees what content. That combination helped the platform become a place where fake and misleading news went viral during last year’s US presidential election.
Facebook has said it wants to curb this sort of behavior, but it still relies heavily on machines rather than human judgement to show people stories.
“What Snapchat did well is it curated a place where a publisher’s brand could live and it created an ad model that can pay,” Hearst Digital Media president Troy Young said.
Hearst has six brands on Discover, including Cosmopolitan and Popular Mechanics, and is profitable on the platform.
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