CNN ends its daily Snapchat news show, The Update, launched just four months ago, saying it couldn't make enough money from advertising
CNN is ending its daily Snapchat news show, “The Update,” launched just four months ago — after concluding, at least for now, that it couldn't make money …
Context & Ripple Effects
CNN's exit closes a loop that opened in July, when NBC News launched Stay Tuned as a twice-daily Snapchat show aimed at younger viewers who had stopped watching traditional TV — CNN's The Update was the follower in that race, and it lasted four months before the ad math failed. For Snapchat this is also familiar territory: the company had already shut down its own Snap Channel originals in 2015 (relying solely on Discover partners) and cut Local Stories curators in 2016, so the platform's original-content ambitions have been contracting even as news brands tried to build on it.
First-order effects
- CNN stops production of a daily show built specifically for Snapchat's format, writing off a four-month investment it says advertising could not cover.
- NBC's Stay Tuned is now the last major US network news show standing on Snapchat, carrying alone the burden of proving the format's economics.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers weighing bespoke shows for Snapchat's Discover platform now have a second data point — after NBC's bet — that daily news programming there does not pay for itself, raising the bar for any new commission.
- Snapchat loses premium news inventory that helped it court advertisers and younger users, weakening the Discover pitch against YouTube and Facebook for both audiences and brand budgets.
Third-order effects
- The pattern runs to its logical end five years later, when Snap cancels its original shows outright alongside 20% staff cuts — platform-native news content proving structurally unable to clear its costs on either side, publisher or platform.
- If ad-supported short-form news cannot sustain itself inside third-party apps, daily news production consolidates back onto channels publishers own and can monetize directly, leaving social platforms as promotion rather than destination.
The trend: Platform-native news shows keep collapsing under their own ad economics, pushing publishers back toward owned distribution and leaving social platforms with less original journalism each cycle.