Snapchat has joined an exclusive club: 4 billion video views daily.
The social media messaging app is showing strong momentum, doubling its daily video views in three months. The milestone was reported first this week by the International Business Times and confirmed Thursday by the Los Angeles Times.
The total daily views puts Snapchat in Facebook’s territory. Facebook reported in April that video on Facebook was getting more than 4 billion views a day. Facebook’s stat has drawn criticism from the video creators because Facebook counts a view after someone watches a minimum of three seconds of autoplay in the News Feed. YouTube, which reached the 4 billion daily views threshold in 2012, has stopped reporting that metric, instead focusing on watch time as its top measure of engagement.
Snapchat video views are counted on click — see our chart of how the social platforms count views — but since they play full screen and are only a maximum of 10 seconds long, it seems likely that people are paying attention.
The IBT reported that the video views in question about being counted only on Snapchat’s “Live Stories” feature, a curated selection of videos and photos from and during major events such as the MTV Video Music Awards. Snapchat inserts advertising within the feature; this week CoverGirl, Taco Bell and Verizon had ads within the VMA Live Story.
Snapchat is playing catch-up in the effort to make money, making the case to advertisers that its product is an especially good way to reach younger people. The company reports that 100 million people use the app daily.
And they are apparently watching a lot of video on the app, which originally was an ephemeral chat and messaging service. In late May, CEO Evan Spiegel said Snapchatters were watching 2 billion videos daily. In late July, the company bumped that number up to 3 billion.
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