NBC News launches “Stay Tuned”, a twice-daily news show on Snapchat, which is aimed at younger viewers who no longer watch traditional TV
NBC News is bringing news broadcasts to Snapchat, the company announced today, with the launch of a twice-daily headline news show it's calling “Stay Tuned.”
Context & Ripple Effects
Stay Tuned extends NBCU's existing Snapchat relationship — the company had already signed a multi-year deal to produce original shows for the platform drawing on brands like SNL and The Voice — and turns it into a daily news habit aimed at viewers who no longer watch traditional TV.
The bet paid off quickly: within a month NBC reported over 29M unique viewers for the show, making it one of the clearest early proofs that broadcast news could find scale inside a messaging app.
First-order effects
- NBC News gains a direct twice-daily channel to young Snapchat users it cannot reach through linear TV, without building its own distribution infrastructure.
- Snapchat gets premium professional news content for Discover at no production cost, strengthening its case to advertisers that the app is a serious media destination.
Second-order effects
- Rivals followed NBC in: CNN launched its own daily Snapchat show, The Update — then shut it after four months, saying it couldn't make enough money from advertising, exposing how thin the economics are even when audience shows up.
- Snapchat doubled down on the network pipeline, launching a tool to let broadcasters pipe snippets of live broadcasts directly into the app, starting with NBC's Olympics coverage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, daily news becomes a platform-rented product: networks supply content to apps that own the audience, while monetization risk shifts onto publishers — CNN's exit suggests only players with scale or cross-subsidies can sustain it.
- Broadcasters' youth strategy consolidates around a handful of social platforms rather than owned properties, giving those platforms structural leverage over news pricing and placement.
The trend: TV news organizations are moving their youngest-audience products onto social platforms they don't own, with Snapchat Discover emerging as the test bed for whether that reach can be monetized.