Snapchat users are gobbling up more and more new videos on the social media app every day, the company says.
How many? Oh, just 10 billion a day, Snapchat says, as first reported by Bloomberg.
That’s an impressive growth streak for the company that started out as a simple way to share disappearing selfies with friends.
Snapchat had less than half that video traffic a year ago: The company had about 4 billion video views a day in April of last year (as the Financial Times reported), a number that jumped to 6 billion in November, and then 8 billion in February, matching Facebook’s latest video numbers. Apparently, the war for video-watching eyeballs is on.
Facebook is also making a new push for more eyes-on-screens with its new livestreams, which debuted late last year. Snapchat is betting more on its “stories” feature to grab eyeballs. In stories, “snappers” can string a series of short 10-second-or-less video clips together. Stories can be watched for 24 hours on the app before they disappear (like most everything Snapchat). The company has also been using more of its video stories to publish short news bites: Snapchat debuted a new political show about this year’s presidential race, and the “discover” feature lets news outlets like CNN and Buzzfeed post their own short videos on the app.
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Though it certainly doesn’t have the more than a billion active users that Facebook does, Snapchat is arguably becoming the social media of choice for some of the youngest app users: The company says more than 60% of American smartphone users between the ages of 13 and 34 use the disappearing photo and video-sharing app. And among teenagers the app beats out every other social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
But Snapchat’s latest video boast may still be a bit of a brag: Snapchat considers a video “viewed” as soon as someone starts watching. Facebook, on the other hand, counts a video as “viewed” after it’s been watched for three seconds, still just a flash compared to the 30 seconds required for an old-school YouTube video view.
