CNN ends its daily Snapchat news show, The Update, launched just four months ago, saying it couldn't make enough money from advertising
Todd Spangler / Variety :
Context & Ripple Effects
The Update was CNN's bet that a daily news format could work on Snapchat's Discover platform — launched in late 2017, months after NBC News committed to a twice-daily Snapchat news show aimed at viewers who had stopped watching traditional TV. Four months in, CNN is pulling it because ad dollars didn't materialize.
The shutdown continues a pattern rather than starting one: Snapchat had already killed in-house original content for Snap Channel in 2015, retreating to Discover partners, and ended Local Stories and fired its curators in 2016. A platform repeatedly pruning its own editorial ambitions was a shaky foundation for a partner's daily news commitment.
First-order effects
- CNN loses its daily presence on Snapchat, ceding the young-audience beachhead it built there just as NBC News's Stay Tuned keeps running twice a day on the same platform.
- Snapchat loses one of its marquee Discover news partners, weakening the case for Discover as a monetizable home for premium publisher content.
Second-order effects
- NBC News becomes the lone major TV-news brand still investing in daily Snapchat programming — if Stay Tuned also fails to clear the ad-revenue bar, publishers' willingness to staff bespoke vertical-video newsrooms collapses with it.
- Other Discover partners now have a fresh data point to weigh against their own Snap commitments, pressuring Snap to prove Discover economics or lose premium content to YouTube and Facebook Watch.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, short-form social video proves unable to fund dedicated newsroom output through ads alone — a conclusion Snap itself later reached when it canceled original shows outright alongside 20% staff cuts. Publisher-platform news deals increasingly look like subsidized experiments rather than durable businesses.
The trend: Social platforms are discovering that ad-supported short video cannot sustain dedicated news production, forcing both publishers and platforms to retreat from original editorial formats.