While YouTube continues to thrive with a strong audience, and Facebook has managed to keep up with billions of views per day, it appears that Snapchat has finally caught up with its own level of viewership.
The social media platform, with its growing number of users and promotional partners, now gets eight billion video views a day, CEO Evan Spiegel told an audience at the Morgan Stanley technology conference. It’s a sizable increase over the six billion reported last year between May and November.
The company’s investment in heightened video content has paid off, attracting not only new consumers, but also brands and advertisers like Discovery, Story Explorer, and the recently announced Live Stories. They’re also looking to attract more desktop users. Those that do watch video don’t just engage for a few minutes. The audience, which now has over 100 million users, spend around 25-to-30 minutes using the service for views on a daily basis.
Viewership numbers have managed to increase five times over a 12-month basis, indicating that Snapchat has longevity to spare, despite earlier doubts about its advertising model.
Partners are also hard at work on new web content, including proposed film content from Fox and Dominos, although the format hasn’t been finalized yet.
These numbers put Snapchat in direct competition with Facebook and YouTube, and now it’s a matter of seeing what these companies do to stay competitive. Facebook recently debuted a new ad format called Canvas, which enables a mini-hub based around video content, like a website that caters to a particular product. Its effectiveness hasn’t been reported yet.
For now, it looks like it’s all about the Snap.