Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat is considering enabling publicly-posted Snaps to remain live permanently, according to a report on Monday.
In what would be a remarkable move by Snap, which popularised the ephemeral nature of so much social sharing when it launched in 2011, the days of disappearing posts might be coming to an end.
A person familiar with Snap’s plans told Reuters the firm may ensure public posts remain visible for longer, or perhaps even permanently. Currently, public stories remain viewable for 90 days, which is already triple the original 30-day limit.
The report says the consideration comes after feedback from Snapchat’s partnerships with news discovery platforms, who say the disappearing Stories made it harder for media companies to work with breaking news content on Snapchat.
Related: How to delete your Snapchat account permanently
If that wasn’t enough, Snap is also ‘weighing the privacy, technical and legal considerations of revealing user identities on public posts’, the sources say. This would only apply to photos and videos published publicly, according to the report, which said those users would have the opportunity to delete said posts.
Considering Snapchat became widely known as a sexting app – enabling users to share content with each other relatively anonymously, knowing it will disappear in a set amount of time – in its early days, these changes are likely to go over well with a rapidly-diminishing user base.
However, given Instagram Stories has now usurped Snapchat in terms of popularity, the company is presumably looking at alternate means of bringing in revenue. These commercial deals with media partners are one way to get it done, while the new plans would also mean advertising revenue from publicly-embedded snaps would be visible for longer.
Snap has declined to comment on the report, but given shares are down around 60% since its IPO in March 2017, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see the company make such changes.
Would you continue to use Snapchat if the proposed changes became a reality? Let us know @TrustedReviews on Twitter.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.