Sources: Snap is testing a feature with some publishers that lets them sell products in the Snap Store Discover channel, alongside Snap's own products
Snap has been stepping up efforts to curry favor with publishers, especially as publishers continue to feel the impact of Facebook's news feed changes.
Context & Ripple Effects
Discover economics have been tilting toward Snap for two years: it first moved to sell its own ad inventory on channels where publishers like BuzzFeed and Vox held exclusive rights in 2016, then ended the licensing fee agreements entirely in 2018, leaving publishers reliant on ad revenue alone. With publishers still reeling from Facebook's news feed changes, Snap has an opening to offer them a new income stream — and this test puts product sales, not just ads, inside their Discover channels.
Commerce is also a familiar direction for Snap: months later it began rolling out camera-based Amazon product search in Snapchat, and in 2019 formalized premium ad buying with fixed-CPM Snap Select. The Snap Store test extends the same logic from advertising into direct merchandising.
First-order effects
- Publishers in the test gain a direct sales channel inside Discover — merchandise revenue alongside the ad-only model they were pushed onto when licensing fees ended.
- Snap's own products now compete for the same Discover shelf space as publisher goods, making Snap simultaneously landlord, merchant, and rival.
Second-order effects
- Facebook, whose feed changes pushed publishers toward Snap in the first place, faces pressure to match with equivalent shopping placements for the same publisher partners.
- If the test scales, Snap's pitch to advertisers shifts from selling attention to hosting transactions, pulling budget from pure media buys toward in-platform commerce placements.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to platforms consolidating distribution, checkout, and inventory into one layer, converting publishers from licensees into storefront tenants whose economics are set by the host.
- Whoever controls the commercial surface inside a content channel captures the margin between discovery and purchase — the same access-layer dynamic that shaped the ad-inventory fights of 2016.
The trend: Social platforms are absorbing commerce directly into content channels, turning publishers from ad-revenue partners into merchants operating on rented shelves.