Dive Brief:
- Before publishing the full list on its own website yesterday, Forbes revealed a portion of its marquee "30 under 30" list on a popup Snapchat Discover channel for 48 hours, according to Digiday.
- The full list includes 600 entrepreneurs with 30 people in 20 different categories. Just 15 were revealed on the Discover channel including Margot Robbie, Simone Biles and Von Miller.
- Forbes collaborated with Snapchat to sell advertising on the popup channel as far back as Christmas, though couldn't confirm any deals. "I’ve been on over 300 sales calls, and it’s become very clear to me that as much as agencies and clients want to reach audiences on Forbes.com, they also want to reach audiences on other platforms," Forbes' Chief Product Officer Lewis D’Vorkin told Digiday. "They also like the credibility we bring to the game."
Dive Insight:
The latest effort from Forbes shows a smart way publishers can tap Snapchat's ephemeral content model to essentially preview larger pieces ahead of official release. "30 Under 30" is one of the most notable — or certainly one of the largest — annual journalistic events and might net the attentions of some younger users on Snapchat who don't necessarily read a premium business magazine like Forbes.
While revealing just 15 names out of 600 might seem stingy, Digiday points out that tapping other platforms for content can be a bit of a tricky situation, as publishers lose a good deal of the ad revenue that would be gained from simply hosting on their own sites.
Forbes is reportedly making an effort to add more Snapchat-like elements to its own mobile site as well to increase its social media content distribution this year. The expanded social effort stems from an understanding that people are getting news in a variety of places beyond publishers' own channels, which are often hurt by online technologies like ad blockers.
Forbes does want to monetize these new social media distributions but criteria such as connecting with a younger audience are more important at the moment as “not everything starts out making money,” D'Vorkin told Digiday. Snapchat has certainly had trouble monetizing its own offerings, and Discover publisher views were reported to have dipped by as much as one-third back in December following format changes to the app.
Forbes is also doing a bit of runaround with Snapchat’s policy of requiring Discover publisher partners to provide original content for the app, per Digiday. In this case, Forbes is creating content that runs first on Snapchat and then is "reverse-published" on its own properties.