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The Wall Street Journal is going after a new audience. So, apparently, is Snapchat.
The Journal will soon be joining Snapchat’s group of Discover publishers, according to multiple sources, the first major business publication to join Snapchat since it first launched Discover back in January. It’s unclear exactly when the Journal is set to launch its channel, but the deal is done, these people say. Both Snapchat and the Journal declined to comment.
The move is significant in that, on the surface, it seems like an odd fit. Snapchat is attractive to advertisers because of its young, millennial-heavy audience, a demographic that doesn’t typically come to mind when you think about the Journal.
But that may be exactly why this partnership makes sense. Benefits to the Journal are obvious. Snapchat provides a platform where it can reach a (predominantly) new group of readers. But Snapchat could benefit, too. The app has amassed more than 100 million daily active users, but will need to appeal to an older demographic in order for that number to keep climbing. Adding publications like the Wall Street Journal might help with that.
The potential risk with this strategy, although certainly small at this point, is that an effort to appeal to an older demographic may turn off the young people currently using the app. If you’ll remember, there was a stretch where Facebook started to lose its coolness factor after users discovered Mom and Dad were sending them friend requests. That feeling seems to have passed (and clearly hasn’t derailed Facebook), and adding the Journal isn’t going to change Snapchat overnight. But it may be worth monitoring.
At the same time, Snapchat did launch Discover with some publishers some might consider stodgy, namely Yahoo, CNN, Cosmopolitan and National Geographic. When launching, Snapchat clearly wanted to signal to publishers and advertisers that it wanted to work with big established brands, but since they’re beyond that stage now, this may signal a different direction.
Snapchat has expanded Discover in recent months, and while it has typically changed publishing partners in waves, it’s starting to add new partners one by one as the deals come together. The Discover page will soon have 16 channels, and you can bet the Wall Street Journal won’t be the last publisher to join.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
