I Want My Snapchat TV

Five days before the March 25 broadcast premiere of Big Time in Hollywood, FL, a new Comedy Central show produced by actor Ben Stiller, the network released its first episode on Snapchat. In January the messaging app, known mostly for letting its young users share annotated photos that vanish shortly afterward, added a “Discover” feature, a menu of free channels from 11 media companies that publish video clips and news stories directly to Snapchat. Two people who work for Snapchat’s channel partners say their daily video clips and written stories average more than 1 million viewers; they declined to discuss specific viewership numbers or revenue. Big Time won’t be Comedy Central’s last Snapchat premiere, says Senior Vice President Steve Grimes.

In November 2013, Snapchat Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel was widely mocked for rejecting a $3 billion buyout offer from Facebook. Snapchat had just completed a round of funding that valued it at half that, and it had no revenue. Although it has an obsessive young audience coveted by advertisers that now totals more than 100 million, the app’s main content is uniquely ephemeral, and the company says it doesn’t track user behavior in the ways most social networks do to sell ads. So even as Snapchat’s valuation rose to $10 billion in August 2014, the company remained largely quiet about how it planned to make money.