Snapchat is known for its picture ‘stories,’ and now Snap Inc seems to be weighing options for making the public stories more durable and less anonymous.
While nothing has been confirmed yet, Snapchat may have been working on feedback received from its news discovery platform partners, including NewsWhip and SAM Desk, which help media companies spot, analyze, and republish public news content on Snapchat. As a part of Snap’s “Stories Everywhere” initiative, which has been working on since its launch last year, to push Snapchat stories everywhere, the new move, if and when implied, may also boost Snapchat’s dwindling business.
It has been brought to Snapchat’s notice that news media publishers often choose not to use links to pictures or videos on Snapchat while publishing their news because even the most public stories on Snapchat disappear after 90 days, and the posts are anonymous. With the option of making posts more durable and making their publishers known, Snapchat may attract more buyers and increase its business by selling access to public posts.
This is a move that has already been tested by popular social media site Twitter, which has reported third-quarter revenue of $108 million from its non-advertising businesses like data licensing. Twitter sells more than 500 million daily tweets to customers, including all sorts of candidates like analytics firms, news organizations, and financial institutions, using stickers and stories that are trending to place trades.
While this new durability and identifiability may give a boost to Snapchat’s dwindling business, with its shares having been closed this Friday at a rate 60% below its initial public offering price of March 2017, it also poses a potential threat to user privacy.
Taking its lessons from Facebook and its constant conflict with privacy issues, Snapchat is weighing its options very carefully, with particular attention to issues of privacy, technicality, and legality. Keeping these in mind, when implemented, the new features will allow access only to those Snapchat content that has been posted on “Our Story,” that is, posts shared publicly, and the sharer will still be able to delete the content shared.
The advertising would be visible for longer, and I could see advertisers paying more for it – Debra Aho Williamson, a social media marketing analyst with research firm eMarketer
The speculation comes in the face of Facebook, having implemented strict restrictions so far as data licensing is concerned, thereby making Snap’s content more valuable.
