A new report from Giga Om indicates that those who share tales in the mobile app’s “Our Stories” feature are benefitting from a number of views. In fact, they’ve calculated somewhere in the millions.
The reporter who wrote the story explained that a friend sent a Snapchat screenshot, showing that someone’s contribution to the recent New York “Snowmageddon” event in the “Our Story” section has been viewed an estimated 25 million times, with users taking as many as 5,000 screenshots of the story.
Other “Our Story” contributors have also managed to get views that have counted over ten million, with one getting a record high 27 million views.
For those who aren’t familiar with how “Our Story” works, it basically enables a collection of “snaps” that are taken and submitted by users for certain events, including music festivals, weather happenings and holidays. These “snaps” last longer than usual ones, staying on the mobile app for as long a 24 hours before finishing.
27 million views for a single story is spectacular, especially considering that the statistic is almost right up there with television viewing. By comparison, AMC’s Breaking Bad registered 10.3 million viewers for the finale. (However, keep in mind that those estimates are tracked by Nielsen, and not entirely accurate.)
Snapchat followed up on the story, stating that the “Our Story” view number actually doesn’t see an increase from people who watch the story more than once. It actually estimates that, with the 27 million views, there are 27 million people that have seen it.
The company hasn’t reported official “Our Story” metrics as of yet, and couldn’t confirm the 27 million views. However, the Snapchat rep that the reporter spoke to did estimate that Snapchat has about one billion stories viewed daily, including individual users’ stories.
What’s unique about how “Our Story” works is that people can report on these screenshots and share them earlier in the day, and they can continue accumulating views over the 24 hour period, gaining popularity as they continue to do so.
More details on the Snowmageddon story, as well as insight from its author, can be found here. It looks like, with this and other “Our Story” submittals being popular, Snapchat may justify its high advertising price after all. Maybe.
