Just two weeks after the announcement of their video-recording sunglasses, Snapchat is back with more news.
In a new update, Snapchat is ditching their “auto-advance” mechanism that would automatically play the next story in your Recent Updates section. Going forward, most snaps will play one at a time, as you click them.
In lieu of auto-playing every story in a user’s feed, Snapchat will let you create a queue of stories to watch from your Recent Updates section. Tapping on the story’s thumbnail will begin the queue creation, giving you a large play button at the bottom of the screen to start watching all of the selected stories.
This leaves the issue of advertisements, which used to be automatically inserted in between stories. Users can expect to see ads inserted between stories when using the queue feature, and as post-roll ads when watching individual stories.
Along with an updated viewing mechanism, the update will also push the Featured (Discover) stories down below your Recent Updates list, to compete with how Instagram Stories are displayed prominently at the top of user feeds. Discover stories can still be viewed below all of the Recent Updates and by swiping one screen further to the right.
These new updates are slowly rolling out to all users.
Snapchat’s recently-formed parent company, Snap Inc, is rumored to be preparing an IPO that would value the company at $25 billion or more. While the demotion in placement of stories from publishers is likely to rattle at least a few, the new watching mechanism is likely to make way for more ads to be shown.
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