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June 2, 2016, 11:01 a.m.
LINK: www.bloomberg.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joseph Lichterman   |   June 2, 2016

Snapchat now has more active daily users than Twitter, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

Snapchat has 150 million active daily users, up from 110 million in December, Bloomberg reported. Twitter, meanwhile, has less than 140 million.

Even though Snapchat is growing among younger users, Twitter remains a more popular platform for news consumption. Nine percent of American adults use Twitter for news, according to a Pew Research Center study released last week. Just 2 percent of U.S. adults go to Snapchat for news. (Regardless, Facebook is the dominant player: 44 percent of American adults get news on Facebook, the study found.)

As young people flock to Snapchat, news outlets are trying to showcase news on the platform both as live stories and in Discover, where nearly 20 outlets — from The Wall Street Journal and CNN to Tastemade and People — publish unique content exclusive to Snapchat.

Digiday reported Wednesday that Snapchat is set to launch a redesign of its Discover section to try and boost the number of users who use Discover:

Instead of static media logos in circles, representing the channels, publishers will have an actual cover image to draw readers into the content, according to one source. One publisher said the cover images would make Snapchat content look more like a magazine — and hopefully attract more eyeballs.

It might not seem like much, but Discover still only captures a small portion of Snapchat’s more than 100 million daily viewers, who are mostly there to message with friends. Snapchat and publishers would like to get more of them into Snapchat Discover stories, because that’s where most of the ads run.

While Snapchat’s core function is a messaging service, Twitter is trying to position itself as a place to follow the news and live events. “I want people to wake up every day and the first thing they check is Twitter in order to see what’s happening in the world,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Vanity Fair’s Nick Bilton:

The solution to Twitter’s problems, they all reiterated, along with Dorsey, is that word “live.” “We now know what inhibits usage, and what doesn’t,” Dorsey explained to me. He said he has a slew of new features—including hosting live video from the N.F.L., where people can talk about the game as they watch it—that will grow the audience and focus on that single, live strategy.

Despite Facebook’s dominance and Snapchat’s growth, Twitter remains a highly influential platform — you don’t see Donald Trump’s snaps highlighted on cable news, for instance — and Twitter will have to make the most of that as it tries to compete with these other larger networks.

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