Discover is Snapchat's mini mobile magazines run by media partners. Here, Snapchat offers slot ads between stories people can swipe through. While it could be a great place for publishers, Discover is not the most popular part of the app.
While there are more than 150 million people using Snapchat daily, the Discover channel has a lot less daily views, let alone engagement.
On June 7th, 2016. the social platform started rolling out a redesigned Discover section that aims to make it easier to boost the views of publishers' content.
How it does that is by interspersing Discover channel with the app's Live Stories which is having tens of million daily views. Live Stories, which consist of user contributions from events around the world, are often more popular than publishers' stories.
With the update, the two will live alongside on both Stories and the Discover Page.
The Discover page now features a Pinterest-style mason grid of tiles, while the Stories page now combines the two rows of static Discover channels and Live Stories into one scrollable row of non-friend content.
Merging the two could be great, but what Snapchat really wants is to have more users use Discover, in which will translate to more advertisement dollars to the company.
To make it more appealing, Snapchat will replace the media company's logo with a square cover page with larger images that previews the story inside. Snapchat also added the ability to subscribe, and this should be another great metric for publishers. The subscribe feature will place unread stories below updates from friends on the Stories page.
While everything looks good, the redesign is just aimed to put more eyeballs to publishers (where Snapchat's money is coming from). What this means, the change is not so user-oriented as it doesn't accomplish much in giving more benefit to users.
The reason for this is because Snapchat wants Discover to be a part of Snapchat experience, where it actually isn't. This is a core issue that is the same that always have been. It has not been addressed and probably won't be.
Snapchat is more like a RSS reader made complete to take the most attention of its users and creativity; it is long known as a source of raw underproduced photo and video content with more visuals than text; it's a platform of choice by many people (mainly teens and young generations); and it's way of attracting engagement is somehow in a different league if compared to its competitor Twitter.
Snapchat is known to be a platform that favored those people that want to compete with bigger more powerful brands. Through creative storytelling, timely videos and authenticity, Snapchat is able to put even the smallest voice a chance to compete.
But with its focus shifting to revenue, Snapchat is like moving out of its previous position. It seems that it's out of place.
What Publishers Want Is Engagement
Snapchat is always seen as an underdog, but its name does compete with competitors having higher profiles and influence. From Facebook to Twitter and Instagram, Snapchat that is already inside many people's mind, although may not compete with tech titans, but do have a culture on its own.
Unlike any other platform, Snapchat has a quirky format with a 'weird' reliance on vertical-only videos. Yes that made it unique, but publishers were having a hard time in both expense and time to make a compelling video specially tailored for Snapchat. This is because Snapchat's 'unique' format made videos difficult to repurpose and used elsewhere.
The decision is like forcing publishers to adopt and brainstorm no matter what. It was hard to keep up on Snapchat, and a complete overhaul on Discover should provide the needed innovation to make those posts shine better.
Here, Snapchat wants to put its character more prominent. Snapchat's goal here is to make professionally-made and community-curated content just as attractive as what friends share on the app. Previously, Discover channels felt bolted on to the experience, and can seem overly polished compared to Stories from friends that are normally more casual and have more human flaws.
But Snapchat's fix to Discover is seen to be next to useless. What seems to be a great strategy, isn't appealing because it shifted Snapchat focus on contents to paid-contents. If the platform should do this, it needs to strip away the heavy production, and allow people to create the raw and authentic contents like the rest of Snapchat users. Only then the feature will see a welcome home on the platform.