Snapchat is doing much more than face swapping you and your best friend, or plastering that ridiculous, licking dog filter on your face.
As Snapchat continues to grow past its reported, ten million British users, the Los Angeles-based company inked another deal sharing live moments from Wimbledon, including user footage from the men’s and women’s final.
Those ten million British users make the UK the platform’s second largest market, the US being first.
Along with the All England Tennis and Croquet club three year deal, Snapchat will also be selling ad spots to sponsors including Stella Artois beer and Häagen-Dazs ice cream.
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In the UK, Snapchat also closed a deal with Nielsen to provide British markets with greater measurements and analytic tools.
The partnerships do not come as a surprise to avid Snapchat users, unless you were too busy taking a thousand selfies.
Over the past few years, Snapchat has been inking partnerships with multiple sporting events and leagues such as the Rio 2016 Olympics, March Madness, MLB clubs and even the Super Bowl, to name a few.
Snapchat is also linking users to other live feeds outside of the sporting world. Live featured city profiles, concerts, the Oscars and its recent Sponsored Discover Channels linking short updates from companies including, ESPN, Comedy Central, Buzz Feed, IGN … the list goes on.
Sport geofilters have also been updated heavily giving users a “display of live scores when they take a photo or video in the vicinity of a selected sporting event.”
Wimbledon’s digital boss, Alexandra Willis, told The Drum during the tournament last year that the All England Lawn Tennis Club wanted to “show Wimbledon to a different audience.”
“It’s about engaging with a younger generation. We wouldn’t want to get to a point where our audience is getting older and we haven’t found an entry point to them,” Willis said.
According to documents released last week, Snapchat has raised $1.8 billion during its most recent funding round which places its value at an estimated, $20 billion dollars. Snapchat also passed Facebook in terms of daily video views with ten billion in a year, doubling Facebook’s number of plays.
These partnerships keep Snapchat in sync with app rivals like Twitter, which is also making digital waves in the live sports market after winning rights to stream NFL Thursday night games.
Snapchat is not done growing, especially in the live sports world. With the press of your finger, you are thrust to events around the world and we fully expect to see more sports deals done by the growing platform.