Is Snapchat About to Jump the Shark?

jumpingsnapchatSnapchat is about to become a publisher.

“Today, the image messaging app announced that it is going to become a new kind of publisher. Publications such as National Geographic, CNN, Vice, and Yahoo, amongst many others, will be pushing content directly to your phone through Snapchat,” writes Brendan Klinkenberg in Buzzfeed. “The items will arrive through a new feature called Discover, where you can call up on-demand video about, well, just about anything from the looks of things.”

According to Klinkenberg, the Discover feature will refresh every 24 hours, and will include advertising in with the content it delivers.

“It views Discover as a distribution system — and with its proliferation on seemingly every under-25’s smartphone in the world, it could prove to be an extremely effective one,” Klinkenberg says.

What remains to be seen is how the under-25s will react to this type of content and ad intrusion, given that mobile ads are largely ineffective, and we think they’ll be viewed as especially intrusive in this kind of platform. We’ll wait and see, but call us skeptics on this one.