Snapchat Adds Another Publishing Partner — News Video Startup NowThis

Posted March 15, 2016

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Snapchat has announced a partnership with NowThis, a video-only news publisher, to make some of its content available on Snapchat's Discovery section.  Snapchat can be remembered as the company that turned down over a billion dollars from Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, but since that surprising day a few years ago Snapchat has grown into a social media powerhouse, particularly influential with millenials. 

Kurt Wagner, of Re/Code reports on this news and writes about the implications of Snapchats foray into news and its shakeup of the media landscape.

Wagner writes:

Snapchat cares a lot about video — its users are watching eight billion of them every single day. Now the mobile communications company has pegged NowThis, a video-only publisher, as its next partner for the app’s Discover section.

NowThis isn’t your traditional news publisher. That’s because, in addition to being video-only, it doesn’t have a Web homepage. Instead, it takes BuzzFeed’s “distributed media” approach, sharing its content directly to platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. It already had a Snapchat account, but now it has an official channel, too.

NowThis, which claims one billion video views per month, is the 21st publisher to partner with Snapchat. (BuzzFeed, for reference, claims three billion video views per month and is also a Snapchat publisher.) NowThis President Athan Stephanopoulos says that it has about 10 people working exclusively on Snapchat content, and will publish seven days a week on Discover.

With 21 different publishers, Discover is starting to get crowded. It was just a few months back that one publisher told Re/code that it was starting to feel like “the hunger games”, as publishers vie for user attention.

It’s one of the reasons Snapchat is looking at new ways to help publishers stand out, including a follow feature, which is in the works but hasn’t been rolled out yet.

“We know we have a deeply engaged millennial audience,” said Stephanopoulos. “It’s not so much about what are other people doing? But it’s knowing who we are and staying true to that and bringing … the things that matter to this audience.”

Like the rest of Snapchat’s partners, both NowThis and Snapchat will sell advertising space for the channel and split revenue depending on who brings in the sale. General Electric is the channel’s first advertiser for launch.