Dive Brief:
- Snapchat is achieving rapid growth in daily video views recently reaching the 10 billion mark, up from eight billion in February.
- The number of views is largely driven by its user base creating a large amount of video to be watched. Bloomberg reported more than a third of Snapchat users are creating “stories.”
- Reports about Snapchat’s level of user-generated content come at a time when Facebook is taking measures to fight a trend of decreased content created and shared by its users, according to a report by The Information from earlier this month.
Dive Insight:
Despite having a relatively small user base in the social media universe, Snapchat's footprint is growing quickly. And the messaging app's surge in views should help it snatch more ad dollars as well. According to eMarketer, U.S. video ad sales in 2015 were $7.46 billion.
Even though the incredible daily video view stats on Snapchat are at least partially a result of its highly-engaged users as both creators and consumers of content, the sheer volume of video views present an attractive marketing opportunity. Being able to tap into both organic video content that appeals to Snapchat users, as well as video ad formats on the platform could show potentially lucrative returns for brands. Snapchat users have clearly demonstrated an affinity for video content, which decreases the risk of entry.
Snapchat’s most recent valuation was $16 billion. The app has more than 100 million daily users spending around 30 minutes a day viewing content. For comparison, during its recent Q1 earnings call, Facebook said its average user spends 50 minutes a day across its entire group of apps including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Back in November, Facebook said it was seeing eight billion daily video views, a figure that has surely increased since, but the fact that Snapchat has a much smaller audience (Facebook has 1.65 billion users), shows the messaging app's strength.
