Snapchat is now catering to a user base that is watching 10 billion videos a day, claimed Bloomberg. That makes for a healthy growth over the 8 billion videos watched daily in February and 6 billion in November 2015.
That apart, another trend that had come to the fore is that a third of Snapchat users are creating content using the ‘Stories’ feature where the video, or for that matter any content, remains available for viewing for 24 hours before vanishing.
Snapchat also explained their app is aimed at inciting the creative side of its users by creating and streaming their content instead of just consuming it. Users have the option to share their videos (or photos) with their friends where those vanish immediately after viewing or publish them as their Snapchat Story where the content has a slightly longer lifespan of 24 hours before disappearing.
The above viewership figures might be of interest to Facebook that has put videos as among its prime focus areas. However, belying its size and user base, Facebook still has some catching up to do here considering its last reported count has been 8 billion videos watched daily. That was in November last, though, and the numbers should have risen some more in the meantime given the push that is being accorded to videos off late, which includes live video feature and such.
However, the one factor where Facebook has a solid edge over Snapchat is its more than 1 billion daily user base, which is an impressive 1.65 billion on a monthly basis. Snapchat continues to be just a fraction the social media giant.
See Also: Facebook launches Video Discovery Hub, Challenging YouTube, Periscope, Snapchat
That said, Snapchat continue to hang on to its own dedicated user base which includes the teens for whom, Snapchat happens to be the most favoured social networking app, as has been revealed in a recent survey. Snapchat meanwhile is up against several other platforms that have woken up to the potential that live video sharing poses. That includes the likes of Twitter, Periscope and such.
Meanwhile, Snapchat also seems to have another issue on its hands; that of its platform fast emerging as a hub of porn videos thanks to the ease with which videos of reasonable quality can be shot these days and uploaded online. Perhaps that was just waiting to happen considering that not everyone has the same tastes and perceptions vary as wildly as the humans race itself. Maybe that again can be seen as the coming of age of the Snapchat app itself, something that YouTube has already been through. However, it will be interesting to see how Snapchat responds to the scenario or whether there will be a policy change in place towards porn videos.
