Snapchat Shows to Introduce 25 New Series From the U.K.

Snapchat currently touts 5 million users in the United Kingdom who watch Shows on the social platform that are produced by its U.S. publishing partners. As part of its efforts to better compete with popular services such as Google’s YouTube and Instagram’s IGTV for the growing number of online and mobile video fans, Snap Inc. is adding 25 new series from 17 U.K. content producers. The content will largely target millennials. The move highlights Snap’s strategy of leveraging more TV-style content to grow engagement in specific markets and increase revenue.

“Although Snapchat has been building Discover in the U.K. for almost a year now, and it has partners producing local content in various other markets around the world, this will be the first time that the company is working specifically with local partners to produce serialized Show content for the platform,” reports TechCrunch.

Rami Saad, head of international content partnerships at Snap, explained that the series are built for the U.S. market, but will not be geofenced, since all the video content is available to all Snapchat users.

Content producers include Sky News, Sky Sports and Vice — all of which have been creating content for Discover — and new partners such as Culture Trip and Gleam Futures. Content will range from news, sports and finance to travel, food, culture and lifestyle programming, even vlogs. Episodes will generally run from three to seven minutes in length.

“While some of these shows will be produced specifically for this Shows launch, they are not, to be clear, Snapchat Originals — the content that Snap launched earlier this month where it is working closely with content producers to build video series that are debuting exclusively on Snapchat,” notes TechCrunch.

According to Saad, Snap is not running ads alongside the videos, but Shows “present an opportunity to help us bring commercials to the platform.” They would likely take the form of six-second, non-skippable spots, the revenue from which would be shared with publishing partners.

“According to the company,” notes Business Insider, “the 21 shows already available in Discover from U.S. creators attract 10 million monthly active viewers globally.”

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