Ephemeral messaging service, Snapchat, may soon let users subscribe to updates from their favourite channels in 'Discover'.
Famed for being popular with young people - a quality that is attractive to many advertisers - Snapchat introduced the Discover option in January last year. It was seen as a way to connect advertisers to users while remaining true to the nature of the product. It is now one of their main monetisation vehicles.
Discover is an option within Snapchat that gives users the option to view content from top publishers, such as National Geographic, CNN, Mashable and Comedy Central, in a digital magazine style. The content includes advertising.
A report by Recode states the company, which has 100 million daily active users, is working on new ways to draw more traffic to these publishers. According to a Recode source, Snapchat has been telling publishers using Discover that it plans to let users subscribe to their favourite channels and replace the publishers logo's within the app with a 'magazine cover' image that changes daily.
The logistics of how it will all work are not clear but the app may send push notifications to users when new content is published, or advertisers could attract users from outside the app via deep linking.
The roll-out is reportedly planned for May, although that may change.
At the moment, Snapchat only has around 20 channels in the Discover option, with hopes of expanding. However, having a channel hosted on Snapchat requires publishers to hire a team dedicated to creating content unique to the platform - daily. Some early publishers were unprepared and have subsequently withdrawn from it, such as Yahoo and Warner Music.
Snapchat said at the launch of Discover last year: "This is not social media...Social media companies tell us what to read based on what's most recent or most popular. We see it differently. We count on editors and artists, not clicks and shares, to determine what's important.
"Every edition is refreshed after 24 hours - because what's news today is history tomorrow."
Towards the end of last year, it was reported that Snapchat was struggling to gain traction with advertisers - fuelling investor concern that its $16 billion valuation wasn't justified by a business that has yet to show a steady source of income.
The new Discover notification feature could help quell those fears.
The number of videos viewed each day on Snapchat has tripled since May 2015 to six billion, according to a report in the Financial Times last year, which cites people close to the company. FT said Snapchat confirmed the six billion figure but had declined to comment further.
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said in May last year the company plans to have an initial public offering, but did not specify when this would happen. In 2013, Snapchat turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook.
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