Source: Snapchat redesign coming Dec. 4, app will still open to camera, all friend-based comms move to left, all crowdsourced, partner, celeb stories to right
the new ‘endless feed’ sounds interesting... http://www.businessinsider.com/ ... tip @Techmeme Alex Heath / @alexeheath : But it also sounds like it's going to put celebs and verified accounts on the same playing field as publishers like NBC in the feed, which is interesting. Could see verified accounts getting access to revenue from ads shown between their Stories maybe? Alex Heath / @alexeheath : Snapchat's new “endless feed” of publisher/crowdsourced videos sounds like it could have a big impact on Discover partners http://www.businessinsider.com/ ... Alex Heath / @alexeheath : Here's some more about Snapchat's big redesign, which I'm told is set to be released Dec 4: Will still open to the camera. All friends interactions (including Stories) to left and all publisher, celeb content in an “endless” feed to the right. http://www.businessinsider.com/ ... Thanks: @stevetweedie
Context & Ripple Effects
Alex Heath's report lands two weeks before the global rollout of what Recode would describe as Snapchat's big split: personal content from friends on one side, professional content on the other (the friend/professional tab divide). The design keeps the camera as the opening surface but turns everything to the right of it into an endless feed where crowdsourced, partner, and celebrity Stories compete in one stream.
That last detail is the quiet story: verified accounts and celebrities sit on the same playing field as publishers like NBC, which reshuffles who gets attention — and potentially ad money — inside Discover. Bloomberg's read a day before launch was that the separation risks alienating exactly those media partners while doing little for new-user growth (the skeptical pre-launch assessment).
First-order effects
- Publishers like NBC lose guaranteed placement next to friend content and now compete head-to-head with celebrities and verified accounts in a single endless right-side feed, where ranking — not a fixed slot — decides reach.
- Every user's daily flow changes at once: friend messages and Stories consolidate on the left, making the left side the social app and the right side a media product inside one shell.
Second-order effects
- If ads run between Stories in the endless feed, Snap faces pressure to share that revenue with the verified accounts and creators whose content anchors the inventory — Heath flagged revenue access as the open question, and creator monetization became the follow-on move.
- Media partners renegotiate their Snap deals around feed placement instead of premium Discover positioning, weakening the leverage that justified original Discover carriage terms.
Third-order effects
- The backlash arc — from this split, through Snap's $386M Q1 2018 net loss, to Snap testing a redesign that puts user-generated Stories back alongside celebrity and publisher content (the partial reversal) — establishes a cycle where Snap's structural tension between friend-graph loyalty and ad-scale media keeps forcing redesigns, including the navigation-bar and Happening Now iterations years later.
- The durable lesson for social platforms: separating the social graph from the monetizable feed trades short-term ad real estate for the intimacy that made the app sticky, and users punish the trade.
The trend: Consumer social apps keep oscillating between friend-graph-first and feed-first layouts as they try to serve both intimate messaging and ad-scale media, with Snap's repeated redesigns the clearest case study.