It’s not new news that the way young and old people consume media is changing. But what is new news is that Snapchat is debuting a stream of brand new shows by some of the biggest names in social media. Ahead of VidCon, Snap has announced a new content series: Creator Shows. Featuring celebrities like Serena Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Kevin Hart, and creators like Emma Chamberlain, Loren Grey, and Rickey Thompson, the three-to-five-minute shows will have eight to 10 episodes per season and will air starting this summer on the Discover page.

For Snap, the Creators Shows initiative provides a way to give its most popular creators to extend to their reach, and keep them invested in building their businesses on Snapchat through monetisation, as YouTube has done for years. Snap will provide a revenue share of advertising for Creators Shows but isn’t disclosing terms of the partnerships. As a further incentive, both Snap Ads and Commercials can appear in Creator Shows – opening up even more opportunities for increasing revenue. As media giants funnel more and more money into original video content, we feel like this might be the strategy that Snapchat needs to compete — rather than trying to find the next big-budget hit, it can focus on personality-driven shows from creators with large followings. What’s perhaps the most baffling is their choice of celebrities, especially given its audience group. We can see that they are trying to cover a wide spectrum of ages with their partnerships, but the question remains: are 13-18 year olds really going to watch a show by Arnold Schwarzenegger? On the flip side, we also find it hard to believe that the older generation (to whom he may appeal), is going to download the platform just to tune into his updates. Nonetheless, we it will be interesting to see whether users will tune it, and whether this will ultimately boost the platform’s video game.