Three of Snap Inc.’s top executives sold their first batch of company shares, picking up an estimated $9.3 million, according to federal disclosures. Employees at the Snapchat maker became free Monday to sell shares awarded through options or other compensation plans.
As NBC News prepared to build its first every newscast for the Snapchat app, it requires the NBC News team look at things in a whole new way — quite literally.
NBC News is launching a twice-per-day news show, Stay Tuned, on Snapchat, part of its push to attract younger viewers who tend to watch TV on mobile devices. Comcast’s NBCUniversal invested $500 million in Snapchat owner Snap Inc. during its initial public offering as it seeks to boost its digital offering.
Time Warner Inc. will invest $100 million in producing TV-like shows and advertising on Snap Inc. over the next two years, in a push by the the media giant to reach young audiences on the social network, according to a person familiar with the matter. The deal will see Time Warner make shows for Snapchat in a range of genres, including scripted dramas, comedies and documentaries, according to a statement from both companies. Time Warner’s properties like HBO, Turner and Warner Bros. will also invest in advertising on Snapchat.
Snap has more than its share of skeptics and critics. And if its stock price is any indication — Snap shares are now trading near their IPO price — it’s not come close to quieting them. One group Snap has yet to win over is the marketing industry. A mere 7% of marketers said they used Snapchat in the first quarter of 2017, according to a recent Social Media Examiner survey.
Social media juggernaut Snapchat announced new original content that will be available for viewing on its Discover platform this fall. One of the upcoming entries will be the platform’s first daily news show, which will be produced by NBC News. Like other Snapchat shows, the daily news program will be 4-5 minutes in length.
Exclusives
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Snap Inc.’s ambitious effort to create television-like content has old and new media companies alike clamoring to learn how to produce shows for Snapchat’s lucrative young audience. Over the past several months, Snap has signed original show deals with NBCU, Turner, A+E Networks, Discovery, BBC, ABC, ESPN, Vice Media, Vertical Networks, the NFL and MGM. It is also in discussions with CBS and Fox. Todayy, Snap plans to unveil another show deal with Food Network-owner Scripps Networks Interactive. WSJ subscribers can read the full story here.
Snapchat continues to beef up its lineup of premium short-form shows: Snap Inc. and Vice Media have struck an expanded deal under which Vice will produce shows exclusively for Snapchat. The first show under deal is Hungry Hearts with Action Bronson, a dating series hosted by rapper-chef Action Bronson (whose real name is Arian Asllani) developed by Viceland. It will debut later this year.
Snap wants Snapchat Discover to be more like TV — and longtime media partners, as always, will be expected to adapt. Snap plans to prioritize the placement of original shows made for Snapchat Discover, according to two sources. With Snap’s latest obsession being in the TV and the entertainment business, the company wants to place a spotlight on individual shows made for Snapchat Discover.
The social app will grow at a much higher rate among older age groups, but from a much smaller base. Also: It will lose ground to Instagram.
Snap Inc., weeks away from it much-anticipated IPO, is close to inking its first major advertising deal with an unnamed ad holding company. If the deal is complete — and there’s no guarantee it will close — Snapchat could win up to $200 million in guaranteed future ad commitments, sources say.
Reimagined content from Discovery properties and exclusive Snapchat content highlight the new programming agreement.
A new study from Fluent, an online marketing platform, finds that 69% of Snapchat users skip the ads that flow into their feeds. What’s more, that number is even higher among adults 18-24, 80% of whom skip through Snapchat ads.
Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal draws the parallels, starting with 10 billion video views a day giving it the kind of “lean back” quality associated with television (as opposed to social’s “lean in”). Among other dynamics, there are also business model similarities: “Video ads that appear in the app are more like TV commercials than the pre-roll advertising that has failed to generate profit at YouTube,” Mims writes. WSJ subscribers can read the full story here.
Bristling over pushback on Facebook’s messed-up metrics and fraud, companies from Snapchat to Twitter are reaching out to assuage doubts. Here’s what five are doing.
The app’s parent, Snap Inc., which appears to be on the cusp of an IPO, wants TV advertisers to think about it as mobile television and spend their money accordingly. It has formed a partnership with Nielsen’s mobile Digital Ad Ratings unit, giving brands the ability to buy guaranteed Snapchat audiences by age group and gender. For the most part, it’s the same kind of system — from ordering to measuring the results — that marketers are accustomed to with Nielsen’s TV offerings.
Michael Lynton, who led Sony Pictures Entertainment through a massive cyberattack and a period of mounting struggles at the box office, is leaving his job. Lynton, 57, who has held the top spot at the Culver City movie and television studio for 13 years, will step down as CEO of Sony Entertainment on Feb. 2 in order to focus his energies on social messaging service Snapchat, where he is chairman of the board.
The Disney ABC Television Group has partnered with Snap Inc. to produce original shows for Snapchat. Under the new agreement, ABC will roll out multiple new original scripted and unscripted shows for the social media platform, beginning with Watch Party: The Bachelor on Jan. 3.
On Thursday, Ron Lamprecht, NBCU EVP of business development and digital distribution, detailed NBC’s recent efforts around digital, including work with Snapchat and investments in BuzzFeed and Vox. In particular, Lamprecht discussed Snapchat and how, while monetization on the platform remains a challenge, NBC is benefiting from its work with the ephemeral social media service so far.
Turner said it plans to significantly expand its existing agreement with Snapchat to include additional sports content as well as original content from Turner brands including TBS, Adult Swim, truTV, Great Big Story and Super Deluxe.
Though Snapchat has overtaken Twitter in terms of daily users to become one of the most popular social networks in the world, it has not attracted the media attention that the 140-character platform earns, perhaps because journalists and presidential candidates don’t use it very much. But in many ways, Snapchat’s parent, Snap Inc., has quietly become one of the world’s most innovative and influential consumer technology companies.
The NBA has renewed its agreement and will nearly triple the content it puts on the app for the 2016-17 season. As with last season, Snapchat will cover weekly games with Live Stories, and this year NBA bitmoji and selfie Lenses are also in the mix.
Snap Inc., the new corporate nom de guerre for the Snapchat app’s maker, is prepping an IPO targeted as soon as late March that could value the company upwards of $25 billion, insiders say. The Wall Street Journal reports if that number holds, it would represent a significant addition to the company’s most recent valuation of $17.8 billion in May. WSJ subscribers can read the full story here.
Snapchat’s privacy-minded users may chafe at its latest ad-targeting options — Snap Audience Match, Lookalikes and Snapchat Lifestyle Categories — which will run in between people’s stories, Live Stories or on its Discover channel. The new ad targeting features customer-matching and lookalike-targeting options and will be broadly available this fall.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have both raised their spending — to an undisclosed degree — on Snapchat, with Clinton buying video ads with a targeted number of views and Trump running an interactive ad that wants users’ email addresses. Nicole Piper reports on Snapchat’s first significant national election ad spend.
Beginning today, it’s a battle for swipes with NBC’s The Voice. Two weeks after NBCUniversal announced a multi-year television partnership with Snapchat to produce shows based on its TV properties and designed for the photo-messaging app’s audience, the media company is rolling out its first entrant: The Voice on Snapchat.
Snapchat’s TV envy seems to be growing: It wants publishers to produce more television-like content for Discover, the app’s media section. The first product of this desire is its big recent deal with NBCUniversal to produce Snapchatty versions of programming like The Tonight Show. The goal is to turn Snapchat Discover into a destination where the app’s young users can return on a regular basis to catch up on the latest episodes of their favorite shows.
The multi-year deal will lean on shows like Saturday Night Live, The Voice and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon for ephemeral content on the app. It will launch with The Voice on Snapchat and E!’s pop culture series The Rundown. NBC will sell ads for all the new shows.
The National Football League on Tuesday revealed that it signed a multiyear extension with Snapchat that will make the NFL the first sports league with a Snapchat Discover channel. NFL Media will handle programming including news, hot topics, photos and videos specifically produced for the mobile app.
Jeff Lucas, who has been with Viacom since 2006, is leaving to join Snapchat, one of the tech world’s hottest destinations, sources say, adding that the executive, who took over ad sales for the entire company last year, is set to exit in July.
Snapchat has scored a partnership with NBC to show highlights from the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. NBC is reportedly hashing out similar deals with both Facebook and Twitter.
NBCU will share video of the Summer Games from Rio on social media for the first time in an effort to connect with those all-important millennials.
With more than a third of Snapchat’s daily users creating “Stories,” broadcasting photos and videos from their lives, users are watching 10 billion videos a day on the application, up from 8 billion in February. The stat shows app is focused on serving people who create and broadcast content, not just consume it
And Pandora to digital video and BuzzFeed to Snapchat. A new study from the VAB claims to make these cross-platform comparisons buyers have been craving for years.
