阿里巴巴将投资Snapchat 对后者估值为150亿美元--彭博
2015年 3月 12日 星期四
路透3月11日 - 彭博周三援引据称熟悉情况的消息人士报导，中国电商巨头阿里巴巴集团(BABA.N)计划向照片分享应用提供商Snapchat投资2亿美元，对后者的估值约为150亿美元。
彭博在一个月前曾报导称，Snapchat正寻求在新一轮融资中最多筹得5亿美元，对该公司的估值最高达到190亿美元。
彭博周三的报导称，阿里巴巴这笔投资并非Snapchat该轮融资的一部分。
路透暂时未联系到阿里巴巴或Snapchat的代表置评。
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Coming to Snapchat: live sports broadcasting
John McDermott| March 11, 2015
Snapchat 有野心，众人皆知。但是，他的野心如此之大，如此之野，动作如此之敏捷，众人可能都始料不及。成为主导性移动媒体平台，这不是不可能的任务，但是，Facebook答应吗？或者这样问，Snapchat 凭什么认为自己有筹码，掀翻 Facebook ? 从与众主流媒体在DISCOVER上展开合作，到尝试实况转播体育节目，Snapchat 的步子很大，很扎实。虽然结果远未明朗，但这显然是一出大戏，值得观察。
Snapchat has grand ambitions to become a dominant mobile media platform, and it has taken one step closer with live sports.
The popular messaging and media-consumption app is working to forge media-rights deals with sports leagues and broadcast networks, including the NCAA and Turner, so it can feature live sports in its “Our Story” feature, starting with the NCAA Final Four, according to multiple media executives familiar with the plans.
The partnership will begin with the Final Four, but there are plans to expand it to other NCAA sporting events in the future.
Snapchat is looking to sell brand sponsorships for these stories and plans to split ad revenue among the sports leagues, the broadcasters and itself, according to one executive involved in negotiations. Turner is said to be close to finalizing sponsorship deals for the Final Four Stories, according to the executives.
While the Final Four deal involves both the NCAA and Turner, it’s an exception. In almost all other instances, Snapchat is looking to create media-rights deals with just the sports leagues.
Snapchat declined to comment on the record. The NCAA did not return a request for comment at time of press, and Turner declined to comment.
“It’s a brilliant move,” Rohit Thawani, director of digital strategy and social media at ad agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, told Digiday. “Snapchat is turning into the SportsCenter of cultural moments. Remember how awesome it was when you’d go to a ball game and you’d make a sign with something funny on it and hope that it made it onto the Jumbotron or, even better, ESPN? Well, Snapchat is doing that with the NCAA and Chinese New Year, Diwali and any other significant moment in time.”
Two female Germany fans show their support for the national soccer team on Snapchat during the World Cup last summer.
Launched in July 2014, Our Story allows Snapchat to splice together “snaps” — photo and video messages — from willing users, thus turning them into a curated, multimedia story available to all Snapchat users. Every Story revolves around a specific event. Sporting events are particularly popular. Snapchatreleased a Story for the World Cup final game last summerand released several college football-related Stories throughout the season last fall. Some of those Stories even featured locker-room footage taken by NCAA football players themselves.
So far, Snapchat has been creating these sports-related Stories guerilla-style, without the explicit permission of the leagues themselves. Problem is, sports leagues are famously cautious about how and where their games are broadcast. By looking to establish media-rights deals with leagues and their broadcast partners, Snapchat is attempting to legitimize Stories and avoid any media-rights infringement issues.
It was not clear whether Snapchat has run into any such issues. What is clear, however, is that Snapchat is now set on conquering live-sports events by way of crowdsourced photos and video produced by its users and assembled by its in-house editorial team.
Despite working with some broadcast networks, Snapchat is not planning to splice in game footage recorded by those networks. Stories will remain entirely user-generated and curated by Snapchat’s own team, but now with the approval of the leagues and, when needed, the leagues’ broadcast partners.
So when Madness takes hold of college basketball next month, Snapchat users will be privy to college students’ on-the-ground views of the pandemonium.
This Story development is separate fromSnapchat’s media channel Discover, which launched at the end of January and features text, photos and video from media companies such as Comedy Central, ESPN, National Geographic and Vice.
As such, the Story media rights deals will involve some networks that are not currently a part of Discover.
Snapchat has sold sponsorships for Stories in the past, such as when Amazon and Hollister co-sponsored a Story about the 2014 Black Friday shopping holiday. Those daylong ads run $750,000 a pop,according to Adweek.
This news is just the latest instance of Snapchat’s quick maturation from “sexting app” to media and tech industry darling. It has beenembraced by Madison Avenueand publishers alike, with Daily Mail North America CEO Jon Steinberg sayingSnapchat has been the best platform partner he’s ever worked with, including Facebook and Twitter.
“A year ago it was, ‘Wow, you have that creepy thing on your phone?’ This year, people are saying, ‘We have to try it,’” Matt Heindl, senior director of social media marketing at digital agency Razorfish, told Digiday in an interview in January. “If Snapchat can geta brand as conservative as McDonald’s to advertise, it refutes the idea that it’s a flashing porn app.”
At this point, anyone who still describes Snapchat is (just) a vehicle for naked selfies is plainly misinformed.
With its push into live sports, Snapchat is poised to become a TV network, a publishing network, a social network,an original media creatorandan e-commerce platform, all within one self-contained app.
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Look forward to seeing Discover take off
Snapchat 是一个值得关注的对象。哈佛尼曼今天发表了一篇很有意思的文章：六家媒体机构如何看这款聊天应用？呵呵，放心，哈佛尼曼不发软文，读一遍，不会浪费你的时间。感觉，Snapchat 会是一匹黑马。不过，本人暂时还没有足够的冲动，改用 Snapchat，因为这是给年轻人用的。但这是值得追踪的研究标的。
Snapchat stories: Here’s how 6 news orgs are thinking about the chat app
ByJOSEPH LICHTERMAN@ylichterman Feb. 23, 2015, 1:05 p.m.
From live events to behind-the-scenes tours, The Huffington Post, Fusion, Mashable, NPR, Philly.com, and The Verge tell us how they’re approaching Snapchat.
When Sam Sheffer, The Verge’ssocial media editor, launched the site’s Snapchat account at the end of July last year, he meant it to be a small-scale experiment.
“I only promoted it on my personal Twitter account,” Sheffer told me. “I didn’t make it an official thing that it was our account, I just told my followers, ‘Hey guys, I’m going to be doing this thing. Follow if you want to.’”
trying something new for @verge— add us on snapchat ‘therealverge’ :) this should be fun
— Sam Sheffer (@samsheffer) July 30, 2014
But soon the audience started growing; today, The Verge’s snaps each get about 10,000 views. The Verge, like many news organizations that are active on Snapchat, still views it as an experiment, trying out new ways to use the format — from covering live events like the NBA All-Star Game or the Oscars to a regular series where Sheffer has Verge staffers explain what’s on their desks.
Snapchat’s popularity is booming. Last year, it said that its users sent more than 700 million snaps daily; the company is reportedly in a new funding round that would value the company at $19 billion.
Snapchat’s potential for news outlets became more clear last month with the launch of Snapchat Discover, which lets a small number of publishers reach new younger audiences with well-produced stories that are made specifically for the platform and utilize slick graphics and video. No one is releasing hard numbers yet, but the buzz is they’re amazing. (“But from speaking to people at several other news organizations, I can tell you secondhand that the numbers, at least for the initial launch period, were enormous. We’re talking millions of viewsper day, per publisher.”)
To get a sense of how outlets are thinking about Snapchat, we asked six news organizations — Huffington Post, Fusion, Mashable, NPR, Philly.com, and The Verge — to explain how they approach the platform and how they plan to continue to evolve on Snapchat. News organizations say their Snapchat presence needs to match the tone of their outlet: That’s why Philly.com, the joint web presence of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, is focusing its efforts on covering local events and why every snap NPR sends ends with a staffer signing off by saying their name and “NPR News,” just as its reporters do on the radio. Here’s what the outlets told us, lightly condensed and edited.
