Snapchat has been relatively meek this year, falling back on its strengths and choosing to go a bit on an alternative growth route amidst all the economic instability and behavioral shifts. Make no mistake – Snap is still the King of AR – but it has also made commendable progress in the fields of audience restructuring, commerce integrations, and more. 

With that being said, Snapchat’s looking to help boost the content visibility of its Snapchat+ subscribers through a new option it’s developing called ‘Story Boost’, which would seemingly amplify their Stories to more viewers. 

A Story of Boosters

As seen in this example, discovered by Alessandro Paluzzi in the app’s back-end code, Story Boost essentially enables Snapchat+ users to ‘get more views’ on their stories. Seriously, is there anything that this guy can’t find? He’s like the Tomb Raider of experimental features – The Experimental Features Raider? Anyhow, more on the topic of Story Boost, friends wouldn’t be informed that they’ve used the option, saving the embarrassment of having to pay for additional reach. 

So, how would this work, exactly?

In the simplest sense, it would ensure that your Story is given priority and displayed among the first Stories for each of your contacts every day. And, well, that’s pretty much it; not sure if Snap could really do more here, as all of your connections can already see Stories that you’ve posted – though if it were, say, a public Story, Snap could also potentially highlight it more to random users or showcase your Story via other discovery means that we’ve yet to discover. Hmm, how ironic, yeah? 

We’re currently not 100% sure how all of this would work, but it is interesting to see Snap experimenting with visibility boost features, which are similar to paid ads, but for organic content. When asked about the new feature, which is mainly still in testing now, Snap only responded with this: 

“Our team is constantly working on new experiences for Snapchat+ subscribers. At this time we have nothing to share about this feature.”

That’s as generic as generic can get, meaning that we don’t really have anything to go on as of yet.

The Wrap

It’ll be interesting to see if and how Snap will look to implement paid reach tools for Snapchat+ subscribers, and whether other apps would consider doing the same for their own subscription offerings. What we can infer is that if this does somehow improve visibility, then that would be enough to justify having to pay for it, otherwise, why bother? It’s really a delicate balance of things, so, hopefully, Snap manages to get the necessities right.

Sources 

https://bit.ly/3VRwv4p