The online video arms race continues to accelerate.
The latest salvo? Snapchat users are now watching more than six billion videos a day. That’s triple what people were watching on the ephemeral chat app last May and an increase of two billion since September. The new number, which Snapchat confirmed with The Financial Times over the weekend, follows last week’s news that Facebook is now serving eight billion daily video views. Facebook’s total is double the view total the social network claimed in April.
As close watchers of this battle well know, the competition for video eyeballs is more than a mere numbers game. Each of the networks, along with Google’s YouTube, is fighting to claim the biggest piece of the lucrative video advertising market, which eMarketer predicts will jump 42 percent, to $7.5 billion in revenue in the US this year.
Comparing metrics for the networks remains tricky, since YouTube prefers to track usage in hours (it says hundreds of millions of hours are watched daily), Facebook counts a view if someone watches for as little as three seconds, and Snapchat counts a view when someone views for as little as a fraction of a second. For a comparison of how social platforms count and look at metrics, see our social video chart from last spring.
The direct comparison between Facebook and Snapchat video is especially interesting because Facebook’s numbers count both desktop and mobile views, while Snapchat’s is mobile only. Facebook also said last week that an average of 500 million people were watching video daily on Facebook, which means the average user is watching about 16 videos a day. Based on Snapchat’s 100 million daily users, the average person is watching 60 video clips on the app, which would make sense, considering Snapchat clips max out at 10 seconds long.
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