Snapchat is giving its Discover platform — an editorial “outlet” within the hugely popular app launched in January that features content from companies like Vice, The Daily Mail and Comedy Central — a bit of a content overhaul.
Warner Music Group and Yahoo have been removed from the vertical, replaced by BuzzFeed (a Snapchat statement pointed to its focus on BuzzFeed’s Motion Pictures arm) and iHeartRadio, which will provide artist interviews and features to Discover. (Recode reported the imminent arrival of Vox, among others, as well.) The new arrivals are expected to pop up in about a month.
A source with knowledge of the situation tells Billboard Warner Music’s content wasn’t broad enough for it to find success on Discover. Another source, however, points to the two companies working on a different way to integrate WMG content into Snapchat. Warner Music Group did not respond to a request for comment at press time.
Discover was intended to give the eyeballs of its young user base one more reason to stay glued to the app, and give advertisers a dependable way for their own messages — which were expensive to buy, before Snapchat normalized its ad pricing — to reach those mercurial, and coveted, users. To that end, Madonnaused the platform to debut her video for “Living For Love” in February.
While hard numbers on usage of Discover haven’t been release by Snapchat yet, its CEO Evan Spiegel claimed in a Bloomberg profile that the users watch over 2 billion videos a day on the service, and that 60 percent of smartphone owners between the ages of 13 and 34 use the app.
