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March 1 - March 6, 2018
Ellis Hamburger,
Ellis formerly of The Verge
Drawing on his experiences from the 2012 campaign trail, Hamby wrote that social media forced both the media and campaigns “to adapt to a treacherous media obstacle course that incentivized speed, smallness and conflict, leaving little room for good will or great journalism—but plenty of tweets.”
Crazy how true this still rings after the 2016 election
the main stage for Hamby and Snapchat’s news team was reporting on the 2016 US presidential election.
Every episode Snapchat produced was viewed by at least a million people, and twenty-two million people watched a portion of the twelve-episode debut season of Good Luck America.
Insane stats for a mobile-only app
In October 2016, the month before Election Day, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton appeared on Hamby’s Good Luck America Snapchat show for an interview. A week before Election Day, 4.4 million Snapchat viewers watched Good Luck America as Hamby spoke with President Barack Obama about the importance of voting. Republican nominee Donald Trump declined an interview request from Snapchat. Trump would only join Snapchat after he defeated Clinton. He would use it to snap special events like his inauguration.
In December 2015, a shooting in San Bernadino, California killed fourteen people and injured seventeen more. As the tragedy unfolded, Snapchat created a live story open to everyone in the United States. The story brought viewers photos and videos from the scene as well as narrative developments and statements from authorities. It brought users citizen journalism, aggregated and narrated by professionals.
Snapchat has the potential to broadcast stories curated from users on the ground at the core of the action. But it remains to be seen if users want hard-hitting news in the same app that they employ to send videos of themselves vomiting rainbows to each other.
Mic.com, a millennial-focused media company, posted a Snapchat story on mental health awareness and left its messages open to its thousands of followers. Readers’ reactions came flooding in. Unlike comments and replies on most social media, each one of these replies was a one-on-one dialogue between Mic and a reader. Some wrote that they were severely depressed and didn’t know what to do. Editors at Mic connected them with counseling resources and kept tabs on them, messaging them regularly to check in on them. The letter to the editor became an email, then a Facebook comment or tweet, and now
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Snapchat’s first in-house content began with Live Stories at the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas. It progressed to capturing interviews with candidates vying to be the leader of the free world.
Snapchat’s coverage of the Rio Summer Olympics in August 2016 featured exclusive footage from partner NBC mixed with on-the-ground photo and video snaps from fans and athletes themselves.
That's quite the pull to be able to bring NBC like that
Ceremony started with a video from NBC of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama wishing the US athletes luck. Then viewers saw golfer Rickie Fowler walking through the Olympic village. Team USA basketball star Kyrie Irving filmed a selfie video of himself and teammate Kevin Durant. Tennis superstar Serena Williams posted four Snapchats from her point of view in the Olympic Village and hanging out with basketball star Carmelo Anthony. Snapchat mixed in footage of the Olympic torch traveling through Brazil with flashbacks of the 2008 and 2012 opening ceremonies. Athletes from a
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Around fifty million people, one-third of Snapchat’s daily active users, watched at least one of the Olympics Live Stories.
In 2015, the NFL and Snapchat collaborated on fifty-eight Live Stories covering games and the draft; seventy million people worldwide tuned in to watch.
Twenty-one million people tuned in to watch the Video Music Awards on a Snapchat Live Story in 2016.
Live shows like the VMAs and Oscars and sports are cable’s last big appeal, and thus huge for Snapchat.
Snapchat isn’t just becoming a replacement for Facebook—it’s becoming a replacement for TV.
NBC won’t simply be repurposing TV content, like it does on Facebook and YouTube, but will be shooting content specifically for Snapchat’s vertical video format.
Snapchat will keep experimenting, pivoting, and evolving as it figures out an ideal content strategy. But Snapchat is not the only tech company trying to convince media outlets that it is the future of publishing. Snapchat has competition from Facebook on every front.
Facebook had seen from its Onavo data how people were watching live video on a startup named Meerkat and Twitter’s Periscope app; the company could also see how many snaps per day Snapchat users were sending, many of which were videos.
Snapchat was never meant to be a place where you had thousands of followers and strove for the most possible views of your story. After all, is chasing story views that different from chasing likes and retweets? But the way Evan envisioned Snapchat wasn’t conducive to growth. Instagram is far more tailored for it, as the app suggests friends to follow and makes it much easier to find and follow accounts you might like.
Ultimately, absorbing the world itself is what Snapchat wants to empower its users to do.
While Spectacles has been positioned as just a toy, it has enormous potential.
Internally at Snap, many felt Spectacles’s rollout was almost more important than the product itself.
After announcing Spectacles in late September, Snapchat made it quite difficult to actually buy the sunglasses. The company used a vending machine, called a Snapbot, to sell the first runs of Spectacles. The Snapbot started in Venice and would announce its location twenty-four hours before it touched down. The Snapbot moved around California a lot, in Santa Monica, Pasadena, Brentwood, and Big Sur, but it also appeared in seemingly random places, like Route 66 in Catoosa, Oklahoma, the Grand Canyon, and Florida State University’s campus.
Some people waited for hours in line for Spectacles—usually Snapchatting, tweeting, and Instagramming the experience. The artificial scarcity let Snapchat portray Spectacles as a toy, avoid harsh scrutiny about sales numbers, and ru...
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The Snapbot avoided Silicon Valley and, for a ...
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Evan is working to make Snapchat the starting place for an entire generation of internet users, akin to previous generations’ homepages and portals. As billions of people come online in the coming years, their first and primary way of connecting to the internet will be a phone.
Gotta love that ambition!
Snapchat could fulfill the original goal of Scan, the QR code-scanning app it acquired, and bridge the digital and physical world.
But if by this point you’re only thinking about whether Snapchat will beat Facebook, then we haven’t looked at the bigger picture enough. Evan’s ambitions are much grander than that. He doesn’t merely want Snapchat to be a great technology startup. Nor will being a great technology company satisfy his appetite. He simply wants to be great.
While tech’s giant companies, from Facebook to Google to Amazon to Apple, seek more and more data about us, Snapchat deletes everything and knows comparatively little about its users.
Do we want everything, or even most things, on the internet to be permanent?
Food for thought
It allowed young people to express themselves in a more genuine way without as much fear that presenting an imperfect and more real version of themselves would come back to haunt them.
