Report: Google paying publishers who create content for its Snapchat Discover competitor ‘Stamp’

Earlier this year, it was reported that Google was creating its own AMP-based competitor to Snapchat’s Discover feature, called Stamp. Now, a new report out of Recode offers a few more details on Google’s Snap competitor and notes of how the company is going about working with publishers…

The report explains that, in an effort to get websites to contribute to Stamp, Google is helping offset some of the costs.

As a refresher, Stamp is Google’s way of compiling stories into visually appealing adn creative forms, with an interface that’s nearly identical to Snapchat’s Discover Stories. Creating these stories takes time and money, hence the reason for Google’s payments to publishers.

Just how much Google is paying, however, remains unclear. One source told Recode that the payment accounted for the costs of “multiple expensive people,” while another described the check as “de minimus.”

Recode also notes that Google is working with a handful of publishers on Stamp, including Conde Nast, Hearst, Time Inc., Mashable, Mic.com, CNN, The Washington Post and Vox Media. Some of those sites, such as Mashable and CNN, are also available on Snapchat’s Discover platform.

Here’s how today’s report describes Stamp:

Publishers who are working on Stamp describe it as multimedia slide format, optimized for phones, that’s supposed to surface at the top of Google’s search results but would also live on their own sites.

It can accommodate video, images and text, and users can advance through slides by swiping or tapping through, similar to Snap’s Discover and Instagram’s Stories.

Google’s AMP-based Stamp platform could debut as early as this month to a “small subset of mobile users,” but a delay isn’t out of the question.