UPDATED 22:28 EDT / JULY 13 2015

NEWS

Snapchat forces Discover service down users throats by putting it front and center

Snapchat, Inc.’s push into becoming a media company just got serious with the latest version of the app now putting its “Discover” news service front and center, pushing its core chat feature in part to the side.

With the change, users will see Snapchat’s media partners directly below their “live” chats, but ahead of their friends list, with no way to turn the feature off; previously, Discover content was was only accessible via a tab that could be accessed by clicking on an icon within Stories or swiping twice from the camera screen.

According to The Wall Street Journal the design change is part of a push by the company to  to get more of its alleged 100 million daily visitors viewing the ads that appear in between the content featured in Discover section, at the time of writing the only source of revenue from the service.

Numbers reported for the Discover service have, by accounts, been lackluster, with one publisher telling the paper that the feature hadn’t lived up to the expectations of partners around traffic and ad revenue; although a specific number wasn’t shared, it was said that it wouldn’t become financially meaningful until it starts attracting more than two million unique visitors a day, “which is well above the partner’s current traffic numbers on Snapchat.”

Killing the goose that laid the golden valuation

With an insanely stupid $16 billion valuation, it’s a reasonable concept that Snapchat at some stage should be trying to make money from the service.

But here’s the catch: users hate the Discover service, and the more Snapchat forces it on them, the more likely it is that many will turn to alternative services; it could literally be a case of killing the goose (or millions of geese) that laid the golden valuation.

The majority of users of Snapchat are teens and similar millennials who are notoriously fickle at the best of times, and it’s a demographic who doesn’t like having a feature shoved down their throats, and it’s not as if there aren’t alternatives aplenty to Snapchat; if what we’ve read online and on Twitter is any indication, it’s not a matter of if some will start leaving Snapchat, as it’s already starting to happen.

The flip of course for Snapchat is there are no easy answers at this point of the game, and it also demonstrates yet again the stupidity of some in Silicon Valley and San Francisco who start these services without ever once considering how to make money from them from the get-go.

Image credit: 67683836@N02/Flickr/CC by 2.0

 

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