Snapchat has seen astonishing growth over the past few months. According to stats released by The Financial Times, the company has seen its viewership triple during a time span of just three months.
Its users now watch 6 billion of its videos daily, up from the 2 billion mark which were told by the social network’s CEO Evan Spiegel in an interview in May. In the future, it may even overtake companies such as Facebook, which has 8 billion daily views currently. However, there is much contention to the way how Snapchat counts a video view.
According to some, Snapchat registers a video view whenever a video is started (videos last for 10 seconds anyway). Others such as Facebook count it after three seconds, which is probably appropriate given the autoplay nature of the king’s share of videos watched there.
What Does This Mean For Snapchat?
With the advertisement race now largely focused on videos, Snapchat has a distinct advantage – its users have exchanged a large number of videos via the network per user. As a result, just 100 million active daily viewers watch 6 billion of these videos. By comparison, 500 million people watch 8 billion videos on Facebook. That kind of data is important for advertisers. Comparisons can be made about the metrics involved at arriving at these figures, but the underlying fact is that videos are becoming a dominant channel for media consumption. Marketing managers certainly are interested in leveraging these channels.
Snapchat remains a smartphone-only service for now. Its current popularity will help it capture a major chunk of video advertisements among competing mobile platforms. Snapchat is now valued at between $10-20 billion, having already rejected a $3 billion buyout offer from Facebook not long ago. With this meteoric growth and changing attitudes towards video, it has the potential to become the next big thing on mobile. Overtaking Facebook would not be a bad start. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel even visited Islamabad recently, signalling how crucial developing markets are to Snapchat’s future strategy.
