In Discover, Snapchat sees a bright spot as it tries to fend off Facebook

Investors are closely watching for whatever might keep Snap distinctive & give it a competitive edge

When Snapchat unveiled Discover, a place in the messaging app where media companies can publish original stories, one of the publishers that jumped to get onto the platform was the website Mashable.

Mashable quickly sank time and money into making daily videos and stories for Discover to appeal to Snapchat’s young audience. The work — which, like almost everything on Snapchat, disappeared after 24 hours — was costly for Mashable.

Even so, Mashable is today making money off Discover under a partnership with Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, to sell ads against its videos and stories. Mashable now counts Discover as an important source of revenue.

“Snap has given us a valuable, loyal, young audience of millions who can be hard to reach on other platforms,” said Greg Gittrich, the chief content officer at Mashable. “It’s very profitable for us.”

Mashable’s experience illustrates how Discover has emerged as a bright spot for Snapchat and its parent company. Discover’s performance is important as Snap, which had its initial public offering in March and is poised to deliver its first earnings as a public company on Wednesday, has been under attack from Facebook.

Facebook and its other apps, including the photo-sharing site Instagram, have systematically copied some of Snapchat’s features over the past year. Given Facebook’s immense size — it has 1.3 billion people who interact with the social network or one of its apps each day, compared with about 161 million users for Snapchat — investors are closely watching for whatever might keep Snap distinctive and give it a competitive edge.

Discover, which was introduced in 2015, may be part of the answer. On Snapchat, Discover resembles a menu of channels, arranged by publisher brand. People can tap on any channel and leaf through that day’s set of stories and videos. More than 100 million Snapchat users view content on Discover each month, according to the company.

Signs of success on Discover could help Snap reach more deals for original television shows, an initiative the company has been building out for many months. It could also help keep people loyal to Snapchat, even as the six-year-old company has acknowledged that user growth has been slowing. And advertisers concerned about their ads running alongside questionable content may pay a premium to be on Discover.

“Our focus is to help our partners develop businesses that are financially significant, and sustainable, in turn funding future investment in quality storytelling,” Nick Bell, vice-president of content at Snap, said of Discover. High-quality storytelling on Discover should also help build a highly engaged and loyal audience on Snapchat, he said.

Although Snapchat’s number of users is smaller than Facebook’s, publishers said they could still reach a lot of people on Discover.

Steven Kydd, a founder of Tastemade, a digital food and lifestyle publication, said his company got over a billion views a month on Discover. And people don’t just skip over the videos and stories — more than 28 per cent of viewers in the United States visit Tastemade’s Discover channel at least five days a week, he said, and his daily audience has grown more than 4.5 times as large over the past year.

As a result, Tastemade has created a studio it can use to make daily videos for Discover, which are produced in eight languages across three channels in the United States, Britain and France. Tastemade now generates a significant amount of revenue with Discover, said Kydd, who declined to say whether the effort was profitable.

All of this is a change from the early experiences that some publishers had with Discover. Creating videos and stories for the platform was initially a time-consuming, money-losing effort, according to five people who produced Discover content for publications that included Bleacher Report, NowThis News, Mashable and Refinery29. These people asked to not be identified because they had signed non-disclosure agreements with their companies.

“At first everyone thought they could just make another video of an exploding watermelon” for Discover, said Michael Brown, a freelance video producer who has made videos for both Discover and Facebook. He was referring to a cheap-to-produce BuzzFeed video that went viral on Facebook Live. “But kids are smart, and they want more than that.”

Now publishers have hired teams of designers, video editors and writers focused solely on making content that fits Snapchat’s unique formatting requirements. That includes videos that are shown vertically, not horizontally, on a phone screen. Stories are also told in a series of “snaps,” or snippets.

© 2017 The New York Times News Service