Snapchat brings ESPN, Comedy Central, Vice and more to the forefront

Snapchat is giving a prime position to ESPN, People, Comedy Central, Vice and about a dozen other outlets -- collectively known on Snapchat as Discover.

Until now, Discover was buried within the app and hard to, well, discover.

In an update Monday, Venice-based Snapchat elevated links to those media channels, putting the Discover feature on a frequently visited app page, signaling that it thinks the mix of content on the channels is ready for primetime and that it wants a massive audience for the ads that run with the programming.

The media networks affiliated with Discover initially reported receiving a couple of million daily viewers, but Snapchat has more than 100 million active users. Snapchat and the channel owners split ad revenue.

The better positioning could disappoint users who haven’t found the channels worthwhile and have opted to get their fix of articles and videos from social networks Facebook and Twitter instead.

Now, for example, the first icon many Snapchat users will see when they go to view posts from friends will, for instance, belong to Yahoo, rather than a friend.

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