NBC News (NASDAQ:$CMCSA) and Snap Inc. (NYSE:$SNAP) first entered into partnership during the 2016 summer Olympics. And now, the two companies have announced that NBC News will start to air a twice-daily news show on Snap Inc.’s messaging app Snapchat.
The show, entitled Stay Tuned, will air in the morning and afternoon every weekday and once per day during the weekends. This will give Snap users – all 166 million of them – three to five-minute updates about the most important stories of the day. Once the show goes live, users will see it in Snap’s Discover section which already includes content from numerous publishers like the Washington Post and the Daily Mail. This is significant news for both companies as Stay Tuned will be the first show to air more than once per day on the app and is being produced by 30 NBC News employees. Who will be hosting the show? NBC News and MSNBC News reporters Savannah Sellers and Gadi Schwartz, of course.
Seeing as Snapchat’s users tend to be within the tween to young adult age range, NBC and Snap are looking to switch things up a bit in an attempt to attract a younger audience that typically doesn’t watch the news. “We’re making the assumption that [Snapchat viewers] are not necessarily following the news quite as regularly as our viewers do on more traditional platforms but that they are just as interested and hungry for information,” Nick Ascheim, NBC News head of digital said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “We’ll tell you why it matters. We’ll be explicit about that.”
It shouldn’t come as a total surprise that NBC wants to launch a news show on the famous messaging app. Looking at Snap’s numbers, one can see that the average Snapchat user will check the app 18 times each day with 75% of the viewers of shows in the 13 to 24 age range. Even though Snap Inc has had a rough couple of months on the market, the company is still looking to increase its efforts around news and Stay Tuned is part of its transition to becoming a top place to access exclusive shows.
As mentioned, the show marks an expansion of a partnership that was first revealed during the 2016 summer Olympics. NBC has invested $500 million into Snap and has launched shows on Snapchat such as World of Dance and The Voice. For Snap Inc, this is the first time the company will run a news show on their platform.
Overall, this should be welcome news to those who have recently sent shares of the public stock below its IPO price over concerns about its ability to pull more advertising dollars to the platform.
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