Dive Brief:
- At six billion video views daily, Snapchat is closing in on Facebook’s eight billion daily video views.
- The difference from a marketing perspective is Facebook is combining desktop and mobile users while Snapchat is only recording smartphone users.
- And viewability is an issue with Snapchat as compared to video rivals YouTube and Facebook.
Dive Insight:
Snapchat, the ephemeral messaging application, has arguably solidified its footing in the video ad space. According the Financial Times, the app has nearly tripled its video views in the last six months.
"If you want to speak to a millennial audience, hire millennials to create the content for you," said Jason Peterson, chief creative officer at Havas North America, told Adweek. "Snapchat is the immediate future for reaching our consumers, [and] whether or not our clients are ready for it, we want to be ready for it."
Video is a major content piece in the mobile channel and viewability is an issue with Facebook’s modest standards at three seconds and Snapchat’s at a lower figure, reportedly charging advertisers based on fractions of a second. Meanwhile, Facebook's traffic referrals to top publishers has plunged 32% since January, according to distribution analytics company SimpleReach.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said, “The more interesting question is not in the near term what we’re going to do to develop ways to consume long-form content, but what traditional media and content producers who have traditionally produced long-form content are going to do to chunk their stuff up better, so that way it can be more easily consumed by this big community online.”
Though Facebook still boasts plenty more users (1.5 billion compared to Snapchat's 100 million), Snapchat has made pushes into more sturdy ground outside of the vanishing videos with Discover and Snapchat Stories, which the company says can garner tens of millions of views in just hours. And according to a recent report, first reported by Digiday, Snapchat users are in talks with publishers to serve more ads and increase sponsorships on its Discover portal media channels.
