Taking Ranker from Shows to Public Profiles.

Snapchat had been winding down the Shows era for a long time, but in early 2026 the wind-down became a deadline: from around February and March, the platform began converting Shows into Public Profiles in large batches, aiming to move everyone across before the end of the year. Episodes did not carry over, packaging and discovery changed underneath the content, and the habits that built a Shows audience stopped working overnight. Ranker came through the switch with real scale, 2.6 million followers across three channels, and years of history, film and ranked-list video behind them.

Our July audit showed a network with the right assets producing the wrong output. Show-era edits were going out as Spotlights: slow intros, fades and Part cards, with some videos taking 25 seconds to reach their first fact. Across all three profiles, a month of Spotlight posting had converted 107 new followers from a 2.6 million follower base. Stories, Spotlights and Saved collections were being treated as one format with three names, and adult framing and bleeped profanity were putting recommendation eligibility at risk.

The engagement began as an audit and a weekly review call. After the first week, Ranker asked us to take the channels over and run them.

We put a dedicated team on it, one social media manager and three video editors, and gave each surface its own job. Spotlight became discovery: self-contained cuts of one to two minutes that open on the strongest fact, clear the one-minute monetisation threshold, and carry clean captions for silent viewers. Stories became retention: intros cut down or removed, Part cards gone, pacing rebuilt so the value runs the length of the video, and the tile chosen deliberately so the profile stays browsable. Saved Stories became the shop window that convinces a profile visitor to follow.

We also changed what went out, not just how it was cut. The Shows had been programmed for an audience over 30 while Snapchat's core skews much younger, so topic selection was rebuilt channel by channel, every video was scanned for flag risk, and anything unsafe was blurred, recut or dropped. Weird History, the most flag-prone channel, got a standing content review and new topic lanes.

In seven weeks the team produced 143 purpose-built edits across the three channels, enough to post daily on both Stories and Spotlight while a backlog built up for the weeks after handover.

The numbers moved every month we were in the building. Rankworthy's Public Stories did 437,000 views in June, 784,000 in July, and 1.5 million in the first fifteen days of August alone, nearly seven times the June daily pace, with daily viewers up six and a half times and average view time up 65%. Across the whole network, daily Story views reached two and a half times the June baseline. Spotlight, rebuilt as purpose-made discovery, reached nearly seven times its June daily pace on Nerdstalgic and more than double on Weird History.