YouTube, the largest and most desired website that provides its users with videos of any kind, has itself a powerful, but yet not so much known, competitor: Snapchat. This clever thing is actually an app that gained its respect because of its self-destructing messages and finds a way to the users’ heart by giving them all possibilities to share outrageous, shocking photos.
But this week is about novelty and Snapchat wouldn’t mind stepping one meter ahead of its ordinary routines. As a result, the company created Discover, a new feature that uses different channels and checks out 5 to 10 stories that are “hand-curated by the editorial team at each company”. The fact that the channel will start all processes every 25 hours is very important and it keeps its visitors to the peak of the news pyramid. Snapchat states that Discover counts on editors and artists, and not on clicks and shares, in order to let the quality eclipse the quantity.
VICE, Daily Mail, CNN, People, Comedy Central, Cosmopolitan, Warner Music Group and Food Network are just some of the companies that are included in the new Discover project and that’s why it weighs so much in the eyes of developers. News and entertainment will be the first ones on the list for the Snapchat hub, making it value more than $10 billion just for this novelty. The advertising that is going to be shown on the app will grow the budget and share it in the hands of Snapchat on the one hand, and the advertisers, on the other. An innovative and very intelligent move that Snapchat will be doing, as compared to Youtube, is that the recommended content will not be selected randomly, generated by a computer, but hand-picked by the most attentive employees of Snapchat. They will be monitoring what kind of people watch certain videos and news, and an invisible rope will tie everyone together, through their interests. Thus, Snapchat Discover transforms human touch into media power like no one ever did before.
The reason why Snapchat hasn’t had such a glamorous success on users is that it never had a “like” or a “Share” button in its structure, like the other social networks or websites that share similar content. The explanation is that the company never wanted to separate people and hide them beneath a decision or a temporary opinion. Furthermore, the ads are not mandatory on Snapshot: users can pick what kind of advertising they find interesting and what type they want to skip.
Image Source: NBC News
