Snapchat Steps Up to Facebook’s League With 8 Billion Daily Video Views

Video views on the disappearing-photos app are up five-fold in a year, CEO Evan Spiegel tells a closed-door audience

Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel (Getty)
Getty

Don’t doubt Millennial power: Snapchat, a favorite among young consumers, is generating as many video views as Facebook, the biggest social network in the world.

People who use the photo-message app watch 8 billion videos there daily, a source familiar with the company confirmed for TheWrap. That’s the same number that Facebook reported in November, on a much larger pool of users. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are private.

The person also said video views have increased five times in a year, and that the app has more than 100 million people visiting it daily. Those stats were reported earlier by Bloomberg and Recode, citing unnamed people who attended a closed-door conference presentation in San Francisco Monday.

The world’s digital companies are racing to one-up each other on video audience, the online format attracts the most growth in advertising dollars. Facebook has been aggressively campaigning to boost its users’ video consumption through moves like surfacing more clips in your News Feed and having them play automatically as you scroll past them.

Facebook hasn’t updated its video views benchmark since November, choosing instead to report total time spent watching clips on the network, shifting how the company reports its video growth similar to rival YouTube. Facebook visitors are viewing more than 100 hours of video there every day, the company said last month.

Comments