We heard about Snapchat’s plans to introduce a subscribe feature in the app back in February when the company informed publishers such as Vice, IGN and CNN that use its ‘Discover’ feature. They intend to let their 100 million plus users subscribe to their channels to generate traffic to their respective platforms. And just yesterday the update that lets users do so rolled out, with a new design skin as well.
First of all, subscribing to a publisher guarantees its content will appear on Snapchat’s Stories page, a section that used to be reserved for Snapchat “stories” of your friends. Publishers were instead relegated to the Discover page, but that proved to be one swipe too many and as a result, the Discover page never got many hits, according to sources.
By now letting publishers have subscribers (subscribing is free), it provides a quantifiable way for publishers to measure their success on the platform and for Snapchat to use for advertising space.
Snapchat has also given most of the app a subtle UI change. Icons for the chat and stories sections have changed, and the stories section itself now features publishers more prominently. Meanwhile, the Discover section has the added update of pressing down on a publisher, so as to be given the subscribe option.
