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Snapchat Bumps Publisher Content For User Stories

Another big social media platform is shrinking the amount of real estate it devotes to displaying content from publishing partners.

Messaging service and emerging media hub Snapchat has quietly reshuffled the order in which it shows users content from their network to give greater priority to Stories from their friends.

The twist: It's at the expense of Discover content from publishers, according to Recode,which first reported the news.

In the new hierarchy, Stories from users’ friends automatically appear first in the Stories window, bumping the channels for publishers participating in Snapchat’s Discover partnership “below the fold.”

That means most Snapchat users will have to deliberately scroll down to see publishers’ Discover photos and video, which in many cases will no longer be immediately visible.

Discover partners still have their own, separate window within the app, but as Recode notes, most traffic for Discover content has come from Stories, not the dedicated Discover window. And in a time of overwhelming content choices, out of sight may mean out of mind for Snapchat users.

As noted, Snapchat isn’t the first platform to lower publishers’ profiles in one of the most popular areas of its app.

In June, Facebook announced that it was reducing the amount of publisher content users see in their news feeds, with a new system prioritizing personal content over news and information. However, it also offered a new feature allowing users to send each other links to Instant Articles in its popular Messenger function.

Then last month, Apple began redirecting traffic from the popular news section of its “Spotlight” search screen to content hosted natively within the Apple News app, rather than on the publishers’ own sites. The result: fewer visitors for publishers to monetize directly.

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