Nieman Foundation at Harvard
While viewership to Discover channels was significant in the first few days after the portal’s Jan. 27 launch, it has dropped an average of 30 percent to 50 percent since then, according to two people who’ve seen the traffic data. One media firm with a channel on Discover saw its unique views drop from one million to around 700,000 and is trending downward, according to a person close to the media company.
But Digiday’s Lucia Moses reports that a design change has push the traffic back northward:
The messaging app popular among teens launched its Discover feature in January with 11 publishers, but users had to swipe twice to get to their content, making it difficult to, well, discover…It’s in Snapchat’s interest to make the content as viewable as possible now that it’s trying to derive revenue from Discover by running ads in the content, though. So two weeks ago, Snapchat updated the design to make the Discover channels visible in the “Stories” tab, which is just one swipe away from the home screen…
Snapchat is notoriously buttoned-up with the press, and publishers who were part of the Discover launch said they’re under instructions from the app not to share their viewership. But several said they had seen a positive impact. “Our views have doubled,” said one, speaking anonymously.
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