Snapchat App Redesign Lets Users Subscribe to Published Content

[MacRumors]

Image messaging and social media app Snapchat has had its Stories page redesigned to increase exposure of commercial publisher's content and boost the company's ad revenue.

The new look, which goes live today, enables publishers to include an image and headline with each daily story in user feeds to increase visibility. The more popular user-contributed Live Stories will now compete for attention alongside them on both the Stories and Discover page.

In addition, Snapchat users can now subscribe to specific publisher channels so that they see unread stories below updates from friends on the Stories page, however non-subscription stories will continue to appear on the Discover page.

The change to the app signals Snapchat's latest effort to boost its advertising business, which remains its primary revenue stream. Currently 19 publishers regularly create specialized content for the platform in the U.S., including Buzzfeed, MTV, Mashable, and Cosmopolitan.

Users can subscribe or unsubscribe to channels by tapping and holding on a story, which should also allow Snapchat to evaluate the success or otherwise of its hosted publishers, while merging Live Stories with Discover should bring more exposure to its channels.

Snapchat reportedly surpassed Twitter recently in its number of daily active users. The redesign is being seen as an abandonment of its earlier strategy to charge users for particular features, and instead focus on increasing its shared publisher and advertising revenue through user clicks.

Snapchat is a free download for iPhone and iPad available on the App Store. [Direct Link]

Article Link: Snapchat App Redesign Lets Users Subscribe to Published Content

 

[HappyDude20]

SnapChat sucks now.

 

[CFreymarc]

Disruptive UI change on a well established platform does not work well in most cases.

 

[Mac Fly (film)]

Snapchat has no idea what it wants to be.

 

[amirite]

How about an icon change I can't put that thing on my homescreen

 

[Glassed Silver]

I'm 26 (27 next month) and boy does Snapchat like an unnecessary service to me.

I understand that as someone who loves their chat logs the service has never tried to be for me, but whatever they add sounds like "me too" to me, only that they copy features that don't even seem to properly fit into what SC always seemed to be. (neutrally speaking)

I'm the last one to hate on adding features if there's a proper reason to integrate them, but I just don't get it.

Getting back to my age: maybe I'm too old.
Maybe I'm just not interested and hence don't understand what would otherwise feel like a reasonable feature if I was a user...

Glassed Silver:ios

 

[LordQ]

Looks like the radio tiles in Apple Music.

This has to be the useless app ever - I was told nudes was its only puropose lol and that they now even come with big emojis all around and ugly and super saturated filters.

 

[CFreymarc]

Snapchat has no idea what it wants to be.

They did a classic "at the top, only next direction is down" move. Expect an app update reducing the size of this crap before 4th of July.

 

[Mr. Dee]

So its basically becoming a Facebook Feed. Why do I want another News Feed app? I already use Twitter and Facebook for this. Even today its still confusing.

 

[Pock]

Fairly sure I'm the only person I know, other than my parents, who does not use Snapchat. Am I missing out on something other than the filters?

 

[vooke]

Installed it today for the first time. Not convinced the future is IT

 

[Batman89]

Good to see the app is growing.

As it is now I think it's comparable, if not bigger than Twitter.

 

[Michael Scrip]

Snapchat has no idea what it wants to be.

It wants to be a company who makes money.

But they can't achieve that if all they do is enable 14 year-old girls to send photos back and forth

They had to open it up to big-time publishers to broaden its appeal. Commercialization at its finest!

 

[CFreymarc]

So its basically becoming a Facebook Feed. Why do I want another News Feed app? I already use Twitter and Facebook for this. Even today its still confusing.

After a day of using the new interface, it looks like an old media puke hired on at Snapchat turned the app into a newsstand. One comment I heard is the whole Snapchat environment is a bit cultist at times.

That is:
1) get the numbers by providing entertainment
2) have the masses in a habit of association
3) start the indoctrination rhetoric

This new UI could be #3.
[doublepost=1465410218][/doublepost]

So its basically becoming a Facebook Feed. Why do I want another News Feed app? I already use Twitter and Facebook for this. Even today its still confusing.

Agree. I want a news feed where I can control the political leaning of the feed. That is, the service takes in all the trending articles, label the political leaning of each article and then have the user driven preference of the app display the desired articles. This was shown at a SigGraph almost twenty years ago on an experimental web page. The reaction of "old media" panel members was almost Pavlovian seeing loss of editorship at the publisher level.

 

[nburwell]

Fairly sure I'm the only person I know, other than my parents, who does not use Snapchat. Am I missing out on something other than the filters?

You're honestly not missing out on much. Unless you have a decent amount of friends on there who post to their "story" it can get quite boring. My fiancée uses it a lot. I installed the app and really only use it to post pictures/videos of our travels. I don't have a ton of friends that use it, so I honestly don't check/use the app as frequently as she does.

 

[Zaren]

So this is what my daughter was howling about yesterday. "OMG, they made it so ugly now! This is stupid!" I took a quick look at the interface, and told her it looked like some senior programmer got promoted and made some changes so the app was more usable by old blind people like myself.

 

[ovo6]

Wish they put live on discovery, I only want too see my friends stories in one tab, unless you're subscribe to it