Inside Snapchat's Entertainment Empire

I'm 24 (which is still weird to say) and so solidly in the target demographic and I'm constantly amazed by Snapchat. Both the app and the company. I literally checked out snapchats discover feature for the first time yesterday. I had no idea what to expect and honestly I loved it. I couldn't see that ever being the main way I consume media but it was enjoyable and relevant, so who konws. The ESPN story for example started with Mike Golic just ranting on the ridiculousness of a star player getting ejected from an MLB playoff game for arguing with a ref. I had literally had that exact same conversation with people a couple of hours earlier. This is obviously a huge coincidence but the focus on up todate relevant material is what allows this serendipitous interaction. And this has been my experience with Snapchat since the very beginning. I question why I would ever use a feature up until the point I finally try it and realize, damn this is cool.

As someone directly inside Snapchat's apparently largest demographic, I honestly can remember voluntarily watching one of the live stories twice, both times because they were related to my hometown. I've never once touched anything in the Discover section, because to be brutally honest, it's exactly what I try to escape. I'm a college student, and beyond even missing cable TV, I now actively dislike it when it's present in the environment. Maybe all my friends are the outliers in the demographic here, but I strongly doubt that any of them would want to watch the Discover content voluntarily either. Snapchat as an entertainment app is foreign to me--I'm using it to communicate with my friends, not with strangers' experiences. I'm already saturated by that content and traditional television content through other avenues.

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This seems interesting. One way forward for Twitter/Periscope would be to build this type of storytelling but also allow you to archive view them in some more permanent fashion. Snapchat is basically becoming TV on your phone. By TV I mean pushed streamed content. Yahoo should do the same.

The mafia should hire this guy to pump penny stocks.