Snapchat maker Snap will attempt to address its stagnating user growth with a new feature called “Stories Everywhere” designed to push user-made Stories to the rest of the Internet and make them leave its app for the first time, Cheddar reported earlier this week, citing a source with knowledge of the effort. The project is said to be led by Rahul Chopra, former Chief Executive Officer of News Corp’s social media intelligence subsidiary Storyful. The Venice, Los Angeles-based company reportedly hired Mr. Chopra precisely to facilitate the development of Stories Everywhere as it hopes his experience in the industry will benefit the firm’s attempt to introduce the results of Snapchat’s hallmark feature to the rest of the World Wide Web and hopefully attract more users to the platform, the insider suggested.
The functionality itself may launch at some point in 2018 but it’s still in an early phase of development and no highly specific availability window has yet been attached to it, according to the same source. The main goal of the project is to have Snapchat Stories created by the app’s 178 million users displayed in Internet browsers through a media player that’s understood to be proprietary in nature. It’s currently unclear whether Snap is considering monetizing the player by displaying ads in it but even if it is, such an effort wouldn’t take precedence over user growth and any potential advertising would likely be minimal. The company is also said to be deliberating the possibility of creating an API that would allow third-party apps to pull data — i.e. snaps — from Snapchat’s feeds for a fee. While making users’ snaps embeddable on other websites wouldn’t be far from such a solution, Snap is unlikely to opt for such a move in the immediate term.
Vice President Nick Bell’s content team was also ennobled with the additions of a handful of new executives, most of whom were elevated from the company’s own ranks, Cheddar claims, citing an unspecified internal memo. Mr. Bell is now understood to be focusing on increasing user engagement that results in new content showing up in the Discover feed, i.e. encourage brands and companies to use Snapchat more aggressively. Additional commitments to news content are also understood to be part of the firm’s core strategy for 2018, as is establishing new content distribution partnerships. The company is expected to introduce an entirely new Android app next year that will feature a revamped version of Snapchat which is presently only available to a limited number of iOS users.