Elijah Harden

“Youtube Stars Expand to Snapchat”, is an article written by Lucas Shaw for Bloomberg Business, an online and print publication noting events in the business world. Shaw explains the popular phone app Snapchat will be hosting a superhero series that will be sponsored by (three) film studios, and executed by Youtube and Vine stars. Shaw further explains that there is a growing fascination within the entertainment industry about content that can be successful on the platform and film producers are actively trying to develop content for the platform. SnapperHero  (the name of the new series) grew out of a previous reality series shown only on social media platforms. SnapperHero is going to be a 12 installment series with clips 100 to 200 seconds long partly promoted by Youtube stars. The show will use input of the fans to develop content for the series.  Alongside SnapperHero, the Discover feature a collection of content from various Snapchat partners including CNN, and ESPN  is also planning it’s launch.

In this piece Lucas Shaw details the different ways companies are trying to capitalize on Snapchat’s recent and unexpected success by developing new forms of media, tailored to match the platform’s “ephemeral messaging”. To develop this point Shaw indicates that the app is incredibly popular among teenagers with 700 million photos being sent everyday and currently valued at 10 billion dollars. Shaw also includes information about executives talking about taking chances with new ideas to try to captivate some of the audience that uses Snapchat, explicitly stating the platform is so new, executives don’t know how to market things or what content to add.