Media giants make a quick move to be on Snapchat

Snapchat has made its name mostly as the smartphone app that swept the teenage world, with kids sending each other messages, or “snaps”, that disappear within seconds. But the app is now turning into something else: a way for the biggest names in media to connect with younger audiences that aren’t that interested in news.

It may seem like an odd strategy. The stories put on the app by partners such as CNN, ESPN, and National Geographic vanish quickly. But the hope is that the estimated tens of millions of Snapchat users — mostly between 13 and 25 — will also swipe to view a video on the crisis in Ukraine, take a cute pet quiz, or try out a cronuts recipe found on the app.

The ways that people are finding news have radically changed in recent years, with Facebook, Google and Twitter becoming the biggest sources of stories and videos on the internet. This means that established news companies — under pressure already to make up for lost ad revenues — are increasingly dependent on social media firms like Snapchat to spread their work.

But while these news sites may get added visibility showing up on a reader’s Facebook feed or Snapchat app, the financial benefits for them are limited since ad revenues are usually split between the news and tech firms. Meanwhile, sites like Facebook and Snapchat don’t have to spend any money creating the stories and videos drawing people to use their products.

And then there’s the question of whether it’s even possible to tell complex news stories in a matter of seconds through an app like Snapchat. CNN recently posted on Snapchat a look at the growing global influence of Daesh. Yahoo News reported on Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush’s speech on foreign policy.

“It’s an incredible opportunity and incredible audiences of millennials and younger users,” said Meredith Artley, editor and chief of CNN Digital. “It’s not about getting everyone to come to you. It’s about getting young audiences where they already area and that’s why Snapchat is so powerful because they have a very desirable and distinct audience.”

The evolution of Snapchat from a simple mobile messaging app to a potential rival to Facebook and Twitter illustrates the fast-evolving power structures of the internet, where the firms with the most users hold the greatest power. Social media sites are the first place many people — particularly audiences younger than 34 — get their news and entertainment.

That has drawn the biggest media firms — from Viacom to Time Warner — to create stronger ties with social networks in order to reach those audiences. Those trends are only strengthening while newspapers and cable television networks aren’t able to raise online ad revenues as quickly as their legacy print and TV businesses decline.

For 18-29 year olds, 61 per cent said they got their political and government news from Facebook in the past week, according to a 2014 Pew Research poll. That compared to 53 per cent of people 30-50 years old. And one-quarter of all 18-29 year olds said they got their political news from YouTube.

For news organisations, the trick will be getting young users in the habit of reading their stories on a regular basis. People under the age of 34 largely do not watch TV or subscribe to print news. And according to a 2013 Pew report, younger news consumers and those who get news online or from social networks are more likely to say they check in on the news only “from time to time.”

Snapchat was founded less than four years ago by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, who had met as fraternity brothers at Stanford University. Based in Venice, California, the disappearing feature of its photo messaging service quickly caught on with teens and young adults and has become known for sending racy pictures.

The site even drew a bid from Facebook to buy the firm for $3 billion in 2013. Snapchat won’t say how many users it has but estimates are as high as 100 million users. The company said an average of 700 million photo texts are sent each day.

Now, as it attempts to take on Facebook, Google and other internet giants, Snapchat hopes those young users — who often use the service every day — will stay on longer by getting all their news and entertainment on the there too.

For months, Snapchat has courted big media firms to come on as partners. And for now, Snapchat doesn’t make any editorial decisions.

Each day, partners choose a handful of short clips, quizzes, recipes and stories to put on the Snapchat Discover feature.

And yet for young people, the brands of big media don’t carry they same weight that they do for older audiences. According to 2014 Pew survey, 15 per cent of young adults said they got their political news from ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’, and 8 per cent said they turned to Buzzfeed for political news.

The reception has been strong, the partners say. They won’t say how many users are viewing their content, but each day CNN’s handful of short videos and stories are viewed in the “seven digits”, according to people familiar with data collected by Snapchat.

Early advertisers include BMW for CNN and Nabisco for the Food Network. But for now, just getting an imprint on minds of youth is the main goal.

“Of course monetisation is a goal, but what we really want is for Snapchat users to think about Food Network and our lifestyle brands more and engage with our brands now so we create those relationships for the long term,” said Tammy Franklin, senior vice-president for Scripps Network Interactive. She said the Food Network’s cable audience is typically over 35 years old and mostly female.

But soon money will become a sticking point. Right now, revenue with advertisers is shared between Snapchat and the media firms. If the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper brings an advertiser, it gets a larger cut of revenues. Snapchat may more easily bring advertisers who will buy blanket spots across the content provided by media partners — and get a majority of revenues in return.

And the partnerships with social media sites worries publishers who fear they are relenting too much profit to aggregators who just host their videos, photos and stories. “What’s particularly interesting about these platforms is that they themselves aren’t content creators,” said Dave Pakman, a venture capital investor at Venrock Capital. “In those models, the businesses are super efficient and don’t have to pay to create high quality content and have no costs for distribution because people just show up.”

— Washington Post