Snapchat has turned to two of the top players in its nascent content division to oversee its burgeoning Live Stories offerings.
Video consumption is growing fast on the platform, leaping from 2 billion views per day last May to 7 billion per day in January this year, according to published reports. Live Stories are collections of video snippets assembled by either users (and curated by Snapchat) or Snapchat’s own production team, many of which cover major events around the globe.
Peter Hamby (pictured above), the former CNN political reporter who joined Snapchat last April to lead its news efforts, will expand oversight to Local Stories, a variation of Live Stories set in particular regions visible only to users in that particular area. Hamby will continue as Snapchat’s correspondent on the presidential campaign trail, where he has been filing regular reports from whistle stops all over the country featuring the candidates themselves.
Sean Mills, who joined Snapchat to oversee original content last June from video-news startup NowThis, will focus on Live Stories that are not of the local variety, such as past coverage of the MTV Video Music Awards. Snapchat saw big traction last year using Live Stories as a revenue driver derived from sponsorships with a wide range of entities from Viacom to NFL.
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Both Mills and Hamby report to Snapchat’s head of content, Nick Bell, who was recently named one of Variety’s 30 Digital Entertainment Execs to Watch. Promotions were announced in a memo distributed Thursday at the Venice, Calif-based social platform. Unaffected was Snapchat’s Discover platform, which brings together video content from a range of top brands including Comedy Central, Buzzfeed, Vox and Vice Media.
A rep for Snapchat declined to comment.
