Snapchats Discover Redesign Launches

new snapchat discoverSnapchat has unveiled a redesign of its Discover and Live Stories features in the hope that it will lead to more users taking advantage of these features, which host some of the apps most lucrative ad formats.

The redesign aims to transform the landing page for Discover, creating a media hub that offers a more visual experience, with tiles that act as covers teasing the content available, rather than the plain logos that were previously presented to users.

Live Stories will be combined with Discover, so that all the services premium content is hosted in a single place. On the apps main page where users receive messages from friends, there will be a tile-based feed that presents a mix of Live Stories and Discover channels, encouraging more people to engage.

Users will also finally be able to subscribe to Discover channels, so that any content produced by these publishers (which include Cosmopolitan, Vice, ESPN, Buzzfeed and MTV) goes to the top of the feed followers see when they first access the app.

“The redesign is an opportunity for publishers to create more compelling visuals to get consumers visiting on a daily basis,” said Athan Stephanopoulos, president of NowThis, a Discover partner, speaking to Digiday.

The main purpose of the redesign is to encourage more engagement with publisher content on the app, which is still primarily used as a tool for consumer messaging. Estimates suggest that around 150m people use Snapchat regularly, but Discover publishers average at best only 3m views a day, and some average as low as 200,000.

Snapchat has recently seen another round of record funding, and the company has now estimated to be worth around $20bn (£13.7bn), but the firm continues to be dogged by questions of exactly how useful it is to marketers, and whether its ad revenues justify the massive valuation. Encouraging users to interact with the publishers who host on the app will go some way to address these concerns, but may not be enough.