Snapchat Adds Refinery29 to Its Stable of Discover Publishers

Publishers are still jumping at the chance to give Snapchat their content. Next in line: Fashion and beauty site Refinery29, which launched its Snapchat Discover channel Monday morning.

Snapchat now features 15 publishers in the United States, although Refinery is also launching on Discover internationally. It’s the third time Snapchat has added or swapped publishers on the platform since mid-July, and it won’t be the last. Snapchat killed its own channel last month, which means it won’t need to redesign the app — which has space for 15 publishers on each page — in order to fit Refinery into the mix.

There are still plans to add additional channels, including Vox.com, later this fall, according to sources familiar with Snapchat’s plans. (Vox.com and Re/code are both owned by the same parent company, Vox Media.)

Snapchat

Discover, for the uninitiated, is a portion of the app where publishers like BuzzFeed, ESPN and Mashable can share short videos or news stories that expire after 24 hours. Publishers are drawn to Discover for the audience, which is millennial-heavy and highly engaged. (Snapchat claims more than 100 million daily active users.)

Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore, for example, said late last month that Mashable’s total unique viewers grew by 24 percent in the month following its Discover launch. The site boasts 45 million uniques per month.

Discover also presents a potential revenue stream for publishers, which Refinery29 is taking advantage of right away. The publication will launch its channel with Unilever as a sponsor, according to Refinery29 co-founder and co-CEO Philippe von Borries. The agreement means Unilever will advertise alongside Refinery’s Discover channel through the end of the year.

Like other Discover publishers, most of the content on Refinery’s channel will be created specifically for Snapchat. It’s hiring a 10-person team to create this content, which includes people to help create ads for Unilever.

“It’s like programming for a TV channel in terms of its range and complexity,” said von Borries. “That’s really exciting to us.”

The sustained interest from publishers is also encouraging for Snapchat. Re/code reported over the summer that the company is looking to hit $50 million in revenue this year. And, of course, more publishers usually means more eyeballs and more advertisers, too.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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