There was once a time when the official Snapchat account published a brand new story every single day. This story often related to a major event going on the day. Think of the Super Bowl in early February. Think of the Indy 500 on Memorial Day weekend. When Snapchat first launched 24 hour disappearing stories in October 2013 it changed the way social media users consumed content. No longer was it the case that users simply look at still photos on Instagram or videos on YouTube. They watched their close friends and family privately share what they were doing in a video update that disappeared in 24 hours. This is the story of the official Snapchat Stories and what was on Snapchat Stories today.
Early on, Snapchat saw the incredible response to stories. Who knew that users would have much more courage when they knew a video would disappear after 24 hours. This completely changed social media behavior. At this point, in 2013, live streams were not a thing and YouTube was antiquated in that it would take sometime hours to upload videos. Snapchat allowed users to quickly post a 5-10 second video about what they are doing on a college campus, at the bar or getting their favorite chai latte.
Snapchat realized this quickly and started to supplement ideas with creative stories that were posted at the top of user’s feeds. The very first story was the official Snapchat Story that literally told the story of what was going on that particular day. They did a city tour in which they showed some of the popular tourist attractions in cities like Washington, DC, Paris and Dubai. There were sporting event stories for the College Football National Championship and Wimbledon. Users simply tagged where they were and Snapchat had a team of employees that would hand select stories to add to the official Snapchat Story page.
For the first year of the Official Snapchat Stories, it simply brought awareness to the millions and millions of American teenagers and pre teens that were using the app. In essence, it thought middle school and high school kids how to “update their status” through a number of short videos. As Snapchat continued to increase in popularity, Stories became the story. So much so that Instagram stole the idea and added it to Instagram in August 2016 in a blatant ripoff of Snapchat Stories.
Over time, Snapchat evolved and the Stories tabs at the top of the “feed” adjusted. It is no longer the case that Snapchat has a dedicated team to post official stories. Snapchat launched the Discover feed in January 2015 and this was the beginning of the end for the old story feed in which users could see only the stories of people they followed along with the official Snapchat account. With the Discover feed, Snapchat created a much more newsfeed based content stream.
In our opinion, this is the exact reason Snapchat has not succeeded in terms of revenue. They certainly have not succeeded the way other social media apps like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have succeeded by monetizing. Snapchat has tried unsuccessfully to advertise through the Discover feed but the way to true wealth is through individuals posting stories and getting recommendations on restaurants, a particular glass of wine or the best coffee shop in a college town. Snapchat tried to show celebrity news and there simply isn’t as much money in advertising for celebrity news versus local businesses that need local people to buy products to stay afloat.