But the most interesting part of the direct social infrastructure, is how Snapchat decided to utilize it as capital, and an entirely new point of value creation.<\/p>\n
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Massive Micro Curation<\/b><\/p>\n
With its users constantly generating, and sending media to friends, Snapchat started to realize that these were actually nodes of perspectives. Because Snapchat is an instantaneous media generation and consumption, its users can only \u201creport\u201d moments unedited; raw windows of real-time occurrences. This, along with receiving a user\u2019s geolocation data, gives Snapchat the opportunity to leverage the perspectives of its users as a collective brain. And this is where the indirect social infrastructure comes into play. Snapchat users aren\u2019t just social media profiles; they have now become news reporters.<\/span><\/p>\n Traditionally, cable was the interface for people to turn to and gather information about current happenings in their community and in the world. The consumption structure is simple; tune in to a channel at a specific time every day to get a news program that changes daily, and whenever there was a breaking story, it would interrupt traditional programming. This structure was flawed though, because it only offered the perspectives of the specific channel broadcasting it; curation of the singular. So the audience typically had allegiances to a specific channel for their perspective.<\/p>\n What is interesting about the new infrastructure of Snapchat, is that it is trying to replace the way in which we consume news, through the utilization of crowd-sourced perspectives. The core importance of Snapchat, is that each one of its users is a node, and each one is a window into a perspective of a moment. But, each moment isn\u2019t the same as the next; there are tiers of crowd importance and interest:<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Direct messages\/Communication:<\/em> These moments could be important to the individual users receiving them, but they don\u2019t always have an importance outside of the smaller circle. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Local news:<\/em> Snapchat’s has allowed its users to be one of the many perspectives within a geolocation story. Just like the news has its local stories, the app allows users to capture media that is tagged via location, and curated into a daily changing montage of perspectives within the area. These are stories that are interesting to the local community, but not necessarily outside of that realm. The stories are filtered and curated by Snapchat ambassadors that decide what goes in the story, and what doesn\u2019t, and only appear in accounts of people within the location zone.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Light + Breaking news:<\/em> In this tier, interesting stories ranging from a montage of a different city every day, to events such as the Grammy\u2019s or sports events to news moments such as the Greek referendum, appear on every user\u2019s account. They are called \u201cLive Stories.\u201d These stories are ones that have a general larger interest associated with them. This kind of crowd-sourcing allows the users to gain perspectives from every angle of a specific event. It\u2019s the idea of the collective brain to understand the spectrum of what\u2019s happening. This is a new method of comprehensive news consumption. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What is particularly interesting is that these Live Stories actually have a larger user base than the traditional TV one’s. For example. during the MTV music awards, MTV had an audience of 5 million viewers tuning in on its cable network, but 25 million viewers tuned in throughout the day to watch the Snapchat story of the event. <\/span><\/p>\n Value Capture and Value Creation<\/b><\/p>\n What is different about the consumption of media in Snapchat, is its ability to give the user member generated media about things they care about, in a way that makes them feel like they are partaking in the action from the front. And it also give its users the feeling that they could contribute to the reporting of media and have an effect. <\/span><\/p>\n The way in which Snapchat captures the value of this pixelated nodal content is through the utilization of ads. But, there are different kinds of ad types possible, and some don\u2019t even explicitly feel like ads. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Traditional Video Ad:<\/span><\/i> Because Snapchat users watch the stories in a linear fashion, the inclusion of ads between content is possible. The infrastructure is very similar to the way that television ads work, but the difference is that they are tailored to the format of media type on the platform (vertical, personal and curated). Plus, unlike in Youtube or Facebook, where the eyes of users could deviate from the ads, in Snapchat, the entire thing is an immersive experience. They rake in about $200,000 per sponsor for 10 seconds per Live Story.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Live Story:<\/em> Entire Live stories such as the VMAs can be purchased and broadcasted to the users for about $800,000. This can be divided up by different ad sponsors though. The Live Stories run for an entire day. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Discover:<\/em> Another spin off of Snapchat\u2019s interface was the introduction of the Discover channels. These are channels that are owned by a specific company (Tastemade, Yahoo!, etc.) and are curated version of stories (not live), very similar to bite-sized TV channels, that change every day. Snapchat charges about six-figures per channel. These are passive ads; ads that users don\u2019t realize are ads, but feel like quality content. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Essentially, Snapchat is the crowd-sourced version of television, and could rapidly start to eliminate the box once and for all.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"Snapchat-Stories\"](\"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2015\/11\/Snapchat-Stories.jpg\")
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