The New York Times will soon launch a daily channel on Snapchat’s Discover menu, which the newspaper sees as prime real estate it hopes will reel in younger readers.
The Old Gray Lady Times will create a daily edition for Snapchat users in the U.S., Canada and Australia based on its Morning Briefing feature, to be published Monday-Friday. The Times didn’t specify when it plans to launch on Discover.
Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company, is expected to soon publicly file for an initial public offering valuing the social player at upwards of $25 billion. Snap claims more than 150 million people use the Snapchat app every day, but Facebook’s Instagram has been siphoning away Snapchatters users with the copycat Instagram Stories feature, according to a TechCrunch report.
The NY Times joins Snapchat’s Discover roster of more than 30 channel partners worldwide. Those include global distribution deals with BuzzFeed, CNN, Comedy Central, Cosmo, Daily Mail, Food Network, IGN, Mashable, MTV, NatGeo, the NBA, People, Refinery29, Sweet (produced in association with Hearst), Tastemade, The Economist, Vice, Bleacher Report, and the Dodo.
Snapchat Discover’s U.S.-only partners include Complex, Vogue, Mitu, WSJ, Now This News, NFL, ESPN and iHeartRadio, and it also includes shows from the NBC’s “The Voice,” ABC’s “The Bachelor” and BBC America.
Snap, citing Nielsen data, says Snapchat is used by 41% of U.S. consumers aged 18-34 on a daily basis.
Snapchat is “an ideal place” to reach younger readers, said Kinsey Wilson, EVP of product and technology for the New York Times Co. “At the end of the day, our goal is to make sure our journalism reaches the widest possible audience,” he said.
For 2016, the New York Times Co.’s print-advertising revenue dropped 15.8% while digital advertising revenue rose 5.9% year-over-year to $208.8 million, the company said Thursday in announcing fourth-quarter results. Overall revenue for the year fell 1.5% in 2016, to $1.56 billion, and operating income dropped 26% to $101.6 million.
The newspaper company said it will assemble a team of “visual storytelling experts” to produce the content for Snapchat. “The New York Times is one of the world’s leading sources for authoritative and credible information — the very values that we built Discover on,” Snap VP of content Nick Bell said in a prepared statement.
