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NBC’s Snapchat news show gains 29+ million viewers in its first month
- grepthisab 9y agoThis is great, and I'm not really surprised by its success. The stuff they have on there now is just total, absolute garbage. Right now it's: "Courtney (one of the karsidhins) is an Egyptian Goddess" "How Much Porn is Too Much Porn" "Is this the Big L for Drake" I just cannot imagine caring about any of this stuff, and it uses a lot of data to just load the previews. It's so annoying I did my first Instagram story this week. Good to see snapchat is putting together some content that you wouldn't see in a tabloid magazine. I realize I probably sound like an old man, which I am not.
- mrisoli 9y agoI have a feeling Snapchat is set to go through a sort of "chicken and egg" problem. Is most of its content geared towards Snapchat's very specific demographic or is their app engineered towards those users' engagement? Whichever is the case different types of content can't find a target audience, different types of users can't find relevant content because they are not the target audience, so what gives?
- nv-vn 9y agoWell, the content in Snapchat is more or less what you make of it, and the news stuff in general is a fairly recent addition. So while it's probably a little bit of both, I think Snapchat was mainly used by its current demographic much before this content.
- wutbrodo 9y ago> "Courtney (one of the karsidhins) is an Egyptian Goddess" Did they misspell "Kardashians", or did you? Even the kind of people who would be interested in why a Kardashian is an Egyptian Goddess would presumably notice the misspelling.
- atomical 9y agoIt doesn't matter.
- wutbrodo 9y agoI know you want to signal that you're too cool to care about the Kardashians, and I don't care about them either. But it's entirely relevant to the conversation and the attempt to understand what kind of userbase this post describes if NBC isn't even bothering to spell names right in their headline.
- atomical 9y agoThe novelty of NBC's move and the reason it's being talked about on HN is that an old media giant is embracing Snapchat's younger demographic. Once you know that any supporting details are largely irrelevant because they only further describe what is already known.
- avaer 9y agoIf my profits depended on retaining users on my platform, I might use an algorithm to optimize the headline mistakes for maximum pedantic debate.
- nv-vn 9y agoNot sure about this, but Vice's snapchat content is often taken from other Vice publications and then very poorly copied. Lots of spelling mistakes nearly every post.
- Grue3 9y agoFWIW, I didn't notice the misspelling.
- throwaway91111 9y ago> karsidhins Unrelated, but it's astounding how well that name communicates despite being terribly spelled.
- chii 9y agoAlso unrelated to OP, but very interesting nevertheless : https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/ https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/ the jumbled up letters and words are readable, but the idea needs to be well known to the user (e.g., it's true that the kardashians are so well known that it's easy to convey the idea).
- iheartmemcache 9y ago"This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text." Huh. I have no problem groking the garbled text, but at the same time I'm pretty much the complete opposite of: "This reminds me of my PhD at Nottingham University (1976), which showed that randomising letters in the middle of words had little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. Indeed one rapid reader noticed only four or five errors in an A4 page of muddled text." Even before I read the first sentence, my mind does a 'lexing first-pass' and looks at the 'shape' of the text. If a word is misspelled, I'll identify it well before I begin to even gestate the content. Interestingly, I can understand I'm conversational (barely) in Spanish and the trait doesn't carry over. My spoken German is an insult to the language, but I can read it well enough to have the same phenomenon occur in German as well.
- carc 9y agoWeird, I always ignored the news 'show' but this prompted me to watch it and it had nothing that you just brought up. It talked the Barcelona attack, Bannon getting fired, and a couple of other actually worthwhile things. Granted, there were a couple of dumb things (like Taylor Swift's social media disappearing or something), but it still exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations
- bnjms 9y agoI misread grepthisab's comment at first. He is saying the things on SnapChat before this new news story are tabloid trash. The news segment is a relief.
- dghughes 9y agoVapid news.
- jrs95 9y agoUnfortunately I think that is what the average young woman wants, and that seems to be the target demographic.
- na85 9y agoBased on your extensive sampling/surveys of young women?
- jrs95 9y agoYou're right, I should be a hyper scientific robot and ignore all anecdotal evidence and personal experience. I will refrain from making any assumptions or criticism of our shallow culture in the future until I have completed extensive research.
- na85 9y agoIt's funny that I get down voted when I'm caustic and sarcastic but you seem not to be. Either way, of the two of us, you are the one citing anecdotal evidence as applicable to a broad slice of the population in general. Seems like a pretty poor argument to me.
- raiyu 9y agoBig difference between what snapchat counts as a "view" - just opening a single video - and actually viewing the program, as in watching it for more than second. Would be interesting to see what 29MM viewers converts into number of minutes of actually viewed content. But hey, as a vanity metric, 29MM is impressive! =]
- niftich 9y agoSnapchat is using a disingenuous metric here to count views which plays to their advantage; an advantage they wish to exploit as long as they can before their advertisers and content partners wisen up and start demanding a metric that better captures whether the content was consumed to the producer's satisfaction enough to count as an impression. Right now, this is not as big of a concern because Snapchat's coveted demographic composition and its curated way of working with content partners and advertisers; this results in advertiser self-selection and attracts brand-oriented advertisers with big budgets and less of an acute interest in tracking ROI. However, once those advertisers look harder at their ROI (like Procter & Gamble [1]) or Snapchat wishes to attract the sorts of SMB advertisers its competitor Facebook can readily attract onto FB and Instagram -- and even struggling Twitter can court -- Snapchat will face increasing pressure to change the way they count views. Facebook, for example, has had a 3-second cutoff before counting a video view for a while, even as they bungled the way they reported metrics [2]. Different platforms have differing definitions on what counts as a view or impression [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14879204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14879204 [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-exaggerating-view-count-didnt-affect-advertiser-bills-2016-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-exaggerating-view-co... [3] http://marketingland.com/whats-a-video-view-on-facebook-only-3-seconds-vs-30-at-youtube-128311 http://marketingland.com/whats-a-video-view-on-facebook-only...
- wolco 9y agoIt is tough to compare them. Facebook videos automatically play so that 3 second level isn't completely real either.
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- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 9y agoIs any of the news content on snapchat worth watching? Scrolling through their entire offering seems to offer less information than a casual glance at the front page of a newspaper.
- two2two 9y agoI asked my 16 year old nephew 6 months ago how he accesses the news. His answer: Snapchat. I followed that with anywhere else? His response was nope. There is a lot of potential for using snapchat for news related coverage. Say NBC creates a "become a NBC snap journalist package" available to anyone that requests it. Included is a pin, handheld mic with "NBCx" (or some other visual identifier), something like an AP style guidebook that is simplified, and a concise bit a rules on what is considered news. NBC can sift through these specific accounts, select and publish what's most relevant. I might sign up for an account if Snap gave me a way to get hyper-local coverage from snap journalists.
- aphextron 9y ago>Say NBC creates a "become a NBC snap journalist package" available to anyone that requests it. Included is a pin, handheld mic with "NBCx" (or some other visual identifier), something like an AP style guidebook that is simplified, and a concise bit a rules on what is considered news. NBC can sift through these specific accounts, select and publish what's most relevant. Sure, why not? We've already completely destroyed the distinction between standards based accountable journalism and blog post rabble rousing thanks to social media "news feeds". This seems like the next logical step.
- two2two 9y agoI understand your sentiment, but why can't there be varying degrees? If we fill the spectrum from terrible to award winning; at least we can choose.
- chii 9y ago> we fill the spectrum from terrible to award winning; at least we can choose. and that's why there's apathy, because you cannot easily tell the difference between award winning and terrible (when the desire isn't to tell the truth, but instead manipulate the public opinion). If only there's a way for the reputation of a new source to be tarnished for reporting badly...
- xirdstl 9y agoIs this like "MTV News" ?
- rdxm 9y agooh great, yet another avenue for younger generations to bleed more of their IQ (and by extension wealth) off. at some point this shit-show is going to come home to roost.... (wait...that's happening now multi-generationally with trump).... seriously, after the multi-decade debacle of the 24 hour conflict channels (CNN/MSNBC/FOX) one would think we'd learned our lesson... apparently not.....
- ue_ 9y agoI wonder for long people have been saying this. https://xkcd.com/1601/ https://xkcd.com/1601/
- weirdstuff 9y agoProbably forever, yet they could have been right all along. (No way to know subjectively, we weren't alive that whole time! E.g. I hear tales of evening strolls that entire towns would conduct after dinner hours, stopping on those front porches that we no longer use. Many towns seemed like ongoing parties 100 years ago. No more of those!)
- retox 9y agoWas with you until you shoehorned Trump in. Get some new talking points. Here's a quote from Socrates, circa 400BC; "The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise."
- quickthrower2 9y agoThe film Idiocracy is a prediction not satire.
- JetSpiegel 9y agoIt's just eugenics propaganda, although you can make the case for that interpretation to be unintended. Good comedians never let facts or good taste get in the way of good jokes, and Idiocracy has some interesting observations, but the framing device is repugnant.
- themark 9y agoAmazed at this hacker news at the top of the charts.
- retox 9y agoSeems like a lot of news stories already cite fb or Twitter posts anyway, so it's a natural progression.
- yeukhon 9y agoSo how long is each segment? 10 seconds? That's not news.
- personlurking 9y agoI'm not familiar with Snap but I recently downloaded Instagram for the first time and, despite 99% of the content being "look at how cool I am!", I did find a regional news station (from Spain) that only posts 30 second clips of local news. It's akin to Great Big Story on YT, in the way that it gives you just enough info to see if you're interested (at which point you can look up more about whatever it is online). I'd love to find more IG accounts like this but I'm not sure news clips via IG is actually a thing.
- danso 9y agoIt is borderline irresponsible for a blog post to tout NBC's Snapchat initiatives without fitting in a line about how NBC is Snapchat's biggest (perhaps only?) major media investor, to the tune of $500M: https://www.recode.net/2017/3/3/14801168/snap-nbc-investment-steve-burke-letter https://www.recode.net/2017/3/3/14801168/snap-nbc-investment... I don't mean to suggest that NBC is futzing the numbers to bolster its investment, just that they have a massive incentive to make things look as rosy as possible. And, on the flip side, they have an incentive to be as innovative in the media storytelling space as possible. Other outlets have Snapchat presences but nothing quite to this scale.
- Sindrome 9y agoI pretty much exclusively followed the last presidential election through Snapchat channels.
- perseusprime11 9y agoToo good to be true.
- nnd 9y agoSo it looks like those kinds of news is not tailored to the user, right? What's interesting is how beneficial is the news curated by an ML algorithm. If we optimize the content presented to the user by the metric of his engagement, that a slippery slope, as we know that the majority of people would unconsciously click on click-bait articles which might not be the most interesting, relevant or beneficial for them. Moreover, there is a risk of opinion bias, as we clearly seen with Facebook during the recent US presidential campaign. Which in turn raises the question: "Is consuming news (even if tailored to your preferences) is the best way to have a well-rounded view of the world"?
- seasonalgrit 9y agoI'm confused -- i thought Snapchat was for sending pictures that get auto-deleted. I'm honestly not sure how to even keep up with this stuff anymore, other than installing everything and using it, which i don't have the time or inclination for.
- rmason 9y agoWhat amazed me from those numbers is that Lester Holt who does the evening news for NBC only gets around 9 million viewers. http://thehill.com/homenews/media/326152-nbcs-lester-holt-tops-evening-news-ratings http://thehill.com/homenews/media/326152-nbcs-lester-holt-to... So how long before Mark Zuckerburg says to Kevin Systrom, call CBS or ABC and then make a copy of this service?
- VLM 9y agoHolt's numbers are for 30 minute views of roughly five minutes of news, if there's enough going on not to require filler, ten minutes of complimentary copy, political preaching to the choir, and video news releases, and finally fifteen minutes of advertising. The snapchat thing is for starting 30 second videos. They're providing a similar amount of news content after all the corrections are applied. Also all social media services have purchased content and purchased clicks available. Its impossible to estimate how many of the 29 million are bots or purchased traffic. Combined, Holt has a larger reach, at least for now.
- rmason 9y agoWhat amazed me from those numbers is that Lester Holt who does the evening news for NBC only gets around 9 million viewers. http://thehill.com/homenews/media/326152-nbcs-lester-holt-tops-evening-news-ratings http://thehill.com/homenews/media/326152-nbcs-lester-holt-to... So how long before Mark Zuckerburg says to Kevin Systrom, call CBS or ABC and then make a copy of this service?
- mzzter 9y ago"But that’s not necessarily a fair comparison, given that Snapchat counts a view as soon as a video opens." Take the 29 million view count with a grain of salt.
- notadoc 9y agoDoes anyone still use Snapchat? Isn't it all teenagers?
- shostack 9y agoSenior digital media guy here. If I were to ask some pointed questions around these claims they might be along the lines of... - What is the distribution of view durations? Given how Snap counts a view I'd be shocked if more than a small percentage were longer than a second or two. - How many of these views were paid to increase reach (either directly or via some deal given their investment in Snap)? Most "successful" online videos like this are kicked off with sizeable spend to claim large view counts, get a spike for popularity (which in some platforms can help get organic views) - What so subsequent views and view duration cohorts look like? I'd be shocked if there wasn't steep drop off. - What is the distribution of account age for these viewers? This could flag less sophisticated fake account creation if there was any padding going on.
- pducks32 9y agoI don’t know if it’s something in recent events (I presume not) but it’s disappointing HN can’t have a conversation around popular culture topic without descending into calling part of the population “vapid” or whatever. Can’t we just accept people like different things. I like ruby. Maybe you don’t.