Is Snapchat Still Worth it for Publishers?

Rewind a decade, and you couldn’t go to an industry conference without hearing about Snapchat. The social platform was exploding in popularity with young people, and although it began life as a peer-to-peer photo sharing app, it had debuted its Discover feed by early 2015. This highlighted content from brands and publishers from CNN and Vice to NatGeo, Yahoo and more.

Snapchat—the company rebranded itself as Snap in 2016—gained a reputation for being a good place for publishers to build audiences, and a more collaborative platform than what competitors had to offer. More importantly, they became a major revenue driver for some, with Vox reporting that in 2018, they had paid publishing partners more than $100 million via a share of the ad revenue served against publisher content. 

In recent years, publisher success stories on Snapchat have dwindled. Redesigns and a shift to focus on creators have put publishers on the back foot with a platform once considered the friendliest for professional media outlets. Now, TikTok is the hottest app on the block. 

But Snapchat is still an app with a significant—and growing—user base, with 100 million daily active users in North America and 99 million in Europe.

So what’s going on with Snapchat now? Is it still a platform worth publishers having a presence on? And what are media organizations doing to prepare for the latest round of changes? We spoke to two of the biggest publishers on Snapchat—NowThis and PinkNews—to find out.

Changing Priorities

UK-based LGBTQ+ news publisher PinkNews was an early adopter of Snapchat’s Discover feed. In 2022, Press Gazette reported that around 80% of PinkNews’ revenue came from social media monetised ads, and the majority of this was via Snapchat.

That has declined sharply since. More competition from influencers and creators in Snap’s various feeds has meant less ad revenue share. PinkNews also monetizes through direct-sold partnerships, which has grown in importance as campaigns can be sold across the publication’s social media portfolio, rather than just monetizing one platform. Still, the company went through a small round of layoffs in late 2023, partially as a result of reduced social media distribution.  

Still, PinkNews see their Snapchat presence as a high priority.  

“We have spent six or seven years growing a massive audience,” Oliver Warley, head of video at PinkNews, told AMO. He said that although revenue from the platform may have declined, it’s still an important place to publish to. “We’ve got a lot of subscribers on the platform, and it is still a big part of our content strategy.”

PinkNews isn’t the only one to see declines on Snap in the last two years. Digiday reported that after an unnamed media company launched Snap-exclusive shows in 2023, monthly revenue from the app decreased by an average of 60%.

It’s a similar story for NowThis, a video-first media company that publishes socially-driven news videos distributed across social platforms. 

“Snapchat Discover used to be one of our main revenue sources when it comes to platform revenue. But now, it’s not meaningful for us any more,” Sirui Hua, head of audience and analytics at NowThis, told AMO. 

Part of that is a result of feed shifts and part is from a change in the way audiences are interacting with social media, Hua said.  

“Audience purposes shift. It’s happening on all the platforms, with TikTok, we’re seeing similar trends on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts,” he said. “Platforms have been making changes on their feeds to adapt to the new audience preferences.”

Produce Once, Publish Everywhere

All the major apps are pushing mobile-first vertical video, which means minimal if any work needs to be done to video content before publishing to multiple platforms—that makes it easier for media companies, Hua and Warley said.

“We’ve got a strategy of ‘video everywhere’, where if we’re making content, it needs to do the best it can everywhere, and have the best chance of paying for itself as much as possible,” PinkNews’ Warley said. “The formats and the way we create content were created initially for [Snapchat’s] Discover, and then we’ve honed that format and now we see that working on other platforms.”

“Every publisher and every newsroom has had to drive efficiencies and change the way they produce content. We’re much more reactive, and much quicker at producing content than we were three years ago.” 

NowThis’s social team similarly used to produce exclusive or differentiated videos just for Snapchat. “But around a year ago, we streamlined our production, so now we’re producing the same content across TikTok, [Instagram] Reels, YouTube Shorts, [Snapchat] Spotlight and Discover,” Hua said.

The publisher has also recently moved to consolidate multiple channels and shows they used to have into just two; one for flagship content and one for more issue-driven videos. 

“Nowadays, we want to think as a holistic brand, and we want to present consistently across different channels and platforms,” Hua said. “We want people to see the same NowThis on Snapchat, Instagram, on other platforms, for maximum impact.”

The Creator Shift

If the first part of Snapchat’s journey was marked by onboarding and nurturing a whole ecosystem of publishers on the platform, the next phase is very much geared towards creators.

Both publishers have noticed the shift to becoming a good revenue source for creators, with invite-only creator program Snap Stars launched to support influencers and public figures.

Hua and Warely declined to disclose how their revenue share with Snap worked, and were unclear about whether publishers are counted as ‘creators’ if these new schemes are adopted across the board.

Still, NowThis’s Hua sees a lot of potential with the shift in focus to creators. “Snapchat [doesn’t] want to treat publishers in a different category to creators,” he said. “We’re excited about this because NowThis has shifted positioning in that we really want our brand to focus on GenZ and focus on creators, so that [change] is working for us. 

“We’re also now collaborating with Snapchat to develop a new monetization strategy [via the platform] that can also align with what we’re working on with TikTok and Instagram.”

Warley also emphasised that if creators and publishers do end up having to work together in the same ecosystem, that is no different from how any of the other platforms now work. They are taking a wait-and-see approach.

Design Changes Incoming

Snap has some big changes on the horizon. Late last year it unveiled plans to merge all its media content—including the Discover feed—into one TikTok-like feed. Some publishers told Business Insider that they were concerned that Snapchat content and shows from professional companies like the BBC and BuzzFeed could get lost in a sea of content, much of it user-generated.

PinkNews’ Warley noted that the current Discover user experience is quite different from TikTok. Users can choose what to watch via thumbnails and tiles, much like YouTube, rather than being served various videos in a TikTok-style feed.

This will almost certainly have further impact on the share of ad revenue from the app. It’s worth noting though that any further move to standardize video requirements in line with TikTok will further ease the production process for publishers.

This may be the biggest change Snap has made in a while. However, Hua said that he still sees the company collaborating with publishers. “Snapchat [is] moving slower, and we’re very happy to see that they’re really making the effort to prioritise Snapchat Spotlight,” he said. “It’s actually working for us, because now this is all about short-form vertical videos, and we want to put our short-form videos everywhere.” 

Hua also believes the uncertainties around TikTok’s future could have benefits for audience growth on other platforms. He sees Snapchat as one of the biggest potential beneficiaries, as younger people are actively avoiding ‘Boomer’ social media networks.

Advice for Other Publishers

Importantly for any future strategies, Hua thinks publishers need to acknowledge that the good old days aren’t coming back. “Five years ago we were seeing really great revenue on Snapchat. But…the good old days won’t come back, so we need to adapt and shift as the market is shifting,” he said.

About 68% of NowThis’s Snapchat followers are Gen Z. So despite less favourable revenue terms than a few years ago, the platform is still a focus as Gen Z is a major demographic that they want to cater for. 

“We definitely want to invest more in Snapchat because we really want to focus on this younger generation,” Hua said. He emphasised that it’s not just a platform where people are passively watching. They’re also talking to their friends, which gives it a potential edge over rivals. 

The longer-term outlook for NowThis is also an important factor in deciding the value of a platform. “We’re always going to see the vertical, short-form video feeds happening everywhere,” Hua said. “Every publisher should think about what’s their vertical video strategy, not just on their website or Instagram, but also platforms like Snapchat as well.”

For PinkNews, Snapchat is still a priority platform. “It still generates revenue for us,” Warley said. “But for publishers starting now, I don’t know if it would give you the same kind of returns as if you’d started quite a few years ago.”

Both publishers acknowledge that Snap as a platform still has significant value for them. It enables them to reach engaged and growing numbers of young audiences, even if the competition for attention and ad dollars is getting stiffer. 

Being able to produce one vertical video and publish to multiple platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts heavily offsets the risk and cost of building a fresh presence or increasing output on Snapchat. But there is nervousness about what these new design changes might mean for future growth, reach and revenue.