Snapchat is opening up your shared Stories to media partners
News orgs will be able to supplement their own Stories with your uploads.
Snapchat is opening up public, user-submitted videos to the "Our Stories" feature to its media partners. Soon, the likes of CNN and NBC News will pull from public videos to supplement their own stories. Deadline writes that media companies using Snapchat will likely overlay graphics and text to the videos for context. For example, folks attending a late-season baseball game and adding it to the Our Stories for the game could see their footage in a post from ESPN.
Deadline writes that the media partners will have their own set of tools to curate these stories and for crowdsourcing footage and photos. More than that, the partners will be able to start making money off of them in short order, with a revenue split system already in place as well.
It's no secret that Snapchat has lost some of its luster, reporting a loss of some 3 million users last month despite its efforts to add new features. You can all but guarantee that the company is charging its media partners a premium for access to the user-submitted videos. Gotta keep the lights on somehow.
In a word, the problem is Instagram. Last April the photo-sharing service revealed that it had over 200 million people using its ephemeral Stories feature (essentially, Snapchat's main offering). At the time, that fraction of the app commanded 50 million more daily users than Snapchat did as a whole.
That's where the numbers get even more concerning if you're Snapchat or one of its shareholders. In late June, Instagram revealed it had 1 billion monthly users wholesale. What's the future look like for Snapchat? If you're a user, probably like it does now, but with even more promoted channels in the Discover tab and more companies vying for your snaps.
