Snapchat: A Case Study

In the digital age, Snapchat is an example of a new medium that has had a significant impact on society and technology. The immediacy of Snapchat created a new social platform for users to communicate, send pictures and even make video calls. Snapchat was created in 2011, with a ghost as their logo. In terms of photo sharing, this ghost symbol is based off the concept, “there, then gone”, but the app quickly became much more than just that (Drake, 1). The public’s desire for an application that allowed photos to disappear was the main force behind Evan Spiegel and his co-founders decision to try out their new app. Once the public had access to the relaunched version of Snapchat, the founders had immediate success. One of the most significant …show more content…
This new feature allows publishers to share stories just as users would share stories with their friends. As part of the discover feature, Snapchat successfully partnered with publishers on their platform and sharing ad revenue. The Snapchat Team stated, “Snapchat Discover is a new way to explore Stories from different editorial teams. It’s the result of collaboration with world-class leaders in media to build a storytelling format that puts the narrative first” (Snap Inc, 1). This was a significant introduction to the app because of the outside information that was brought to the app. The introduction of Discover was not only a beneficial decision on behalf of Snapchat, but the outside sources as well. This is because users who are already using snapchat are directed to the publisher’s platforms. Due to the fact that users are already inside the application, their experience is contained within the platform, while Snapchat drives awareness for the publishers. For example, a Snapchat user who may not have known what Daily Mail was, can click their Discover page and learn everything that this specific news source is …show more content…
According to the results that were done by a survey for Variety, “44% of Snapchatters who use the Live Story and Discover features do so at least once a day. And 30% of users use the app as their primary means of getting information about the 2016 Presidential Campaign“ (Wallenstein, 1). Snapchat became a power in not only making the public aware of information from the 2016 Presidential Election, but also swayed opinions. The power of Discover does not stop there, but rather has been developed even further to create news geo-tagging. Through certain location tags, Snapchat gives users live updates of breaking news in their area. For example, on September 17th, when the bomb originally went off in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, Snapchat quickly created a breaking news segment informing its users about the situation and allowing other users in the vicinity to upload live videos to the NYC