Hearst is doubling down on Snapchat Discover

Sarah
Buck, 23, (L) recruiter for messaging app Snapchat, talks to job
seekers at a booth at TechFair LA, a technology job fair, in Los
Angeles, California, U.S., January 26, 2017
Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

• Hearst is ramping up its Snapchat output.
• Four of the company’s publications will now produce new
  Snapchat Discover content twice a week.
• Hearst says each of its Snapchat channels pulls 2
  million unique readers per edition every week.

Even as
some publishers scale back on Snapchat Discover or look
to pivot to producing shows for the platform, Hearst is doubling
down on its efforts on Snapchat Discover.

Starting this week, the media company is ramping up the
frequency of four of its brands on the platform,
including Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Popular
Mechanics and Road & Track. Discover is
Snapchat’s content hub, where over 70 media partners
globally program digital magazines with dozens of videos,
articles and quizzes. 

While the four Discover channels were earlier updated weekly,
they will now have fresh content twice a week. All four brands
each launched on the platform within the past six months and have
their own dedicated Snapchat Discover teams, said Hearst.

“We saw that the channels all exceeded our expectations from
an audience and engagement perspective right out of the gate,”
Brian Madden, vp of audience at Hearst Magazines Digital, told
Business Insider. “We had more people reading the stories and
spending more time with the stories than we had expected.”

Specifically, each of the brands was averaging at 2
million unique visitors per edition every week, according to
Hearst, with a chunk of the audience spending more than 10
minutes per edition. And 75% of this audience was between the
ages of 13 and 24. 

By increasing the amount of content it churns out for the
publications, Hearst hopes to both improve its
engagement and interaction with its existing audience, as
well as also drive more loyalty from casual visitors by offering
them a broader range of content more frequently.

“We have found the Snapchat audience to be a very engaged
audience,” said Madden. “We want to engage with this audience on
a more frequent basis.”

Hearst is also looking to boost its revenue by monetizing a
larger, recurring audience. By having two editions per week
instead of one for the four publications, its sales
team has double the opportunities to sell sponsored editions to
advertisers looking for deeper content alignment. 

Brands that have run such types of sponsored editions, for
example, include beauty brand Laura Mercier and
beer maker Stella Artois on
Bazaar and Porsche on Road
& Track.

“Starting with one story a week was an opportunity to
understand what the audience wanted and cared about,” said
Madden. “Now that we know that, we can capitalize on it.”

The move stands in contrast to other publishers like CNN and
Comedy Central, who have both recently pulled back on their
Discover output in order to focus on producing shows on
Snapchat. The platform itself is touting its ability to
foster shows, and some publishers are worried hat it is
moving away from its original ‘digital magazine’ concept that
underpinned Discover.

In contrast, Hearst has always been bullish on Snapchat
Discover and seems to continue to be so. Hearst’s Cosmopolitan
has been publishing daily on Snapchat Discover since it launched
in January 2015. The company also launch an
new publication in partnership with Snapchat that lives and
breathes entirely on the platform called Sweet, apart from a
weekly channel for Seventeen.