SNAPCHAT MAKES CHANGES TO STORIES, AGAIN

Snapchat Stories are changing once again, in an apparent reversal of two previous updates. Stories will no longer advance automatically and Discover content has been moved further down the page.

While at the time the changes to Stories appeared to be a good thing, at least, from Snapchat’s point of view (with high completion rates for advertising that appeared mid-roll and good engagement rates for their Discover content), some users disliked the apparent ‘clutter’ of their feed, as well as the idea of being forced to watch Stories.

Discover content has been moved from the top of the feed, and is now appearing underneath the most recent Story posts, and auto-playing Stories are being replaced with a new feature called ‘Stories Playlist’, which is essentially a way to personalise which Stories are played automatically. This feature is optional, and allows users to queue up several Stories and play them immediately following each other.

“Sometimes we just want to see what our close friends or family are up to – not all of our friends – and Auto Advance prevented that,” explained Snapchat. “We took what we learned from Auto Advance and built Story Playlist… an easy way to select the Stories you want to watch and seamlessly view them full screen in the order you selected them.”

While the loss of auto-advancing Stories would appear to be a blow to advertisers who had full screen video content appear mid-roll, Snapchat has stated that ads will continue to appear within the playlist feature, and will also sometimes appear at the end of a single story.