Video: The Snapchat Revolution

The ephemeral-messaging mobile application has passed the milestone of 10 billion daily video views.

More than a third of Snapchat’s daily users create “Live Stories” (photo and/or video collections). The number of videos viewed daily on Snapchat has therefore increased from 8 billion in February to 10 billion in April.

Snapchat is increasingly positioning itself as the social network whose users create the most content. Of course, unlike that of its competitors, Snapchat’s home screen is a camera, not a stream of messages.

That encourages its members to share their daily experiences: They can send snaps – visible for a few seconds – to their friends or broadcast “Live Stories” – visible for 24 hours – to a wider audience.

As a result, Snapchat has become a very serious competitor for Facebook in digital video: Its 100 million daily active users watch 10 billion videos each day while Facebook’s billion daily active users “only” watch 8 billion¹.

That explains why Facebook is reportedly developing a new standalone mobile application that is said to be copying Snapchat’s camera-first user interface.

The ephemeral-messaging mobile application is indeed leading a revolution in the social networking world. As Robert Peck, an analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, noted,

“On Snapchat, conversations are not only including a photo or video, but are being started by them.

People’s behavior is changing so that photos are being used as speech instead of a repository for memories.“

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¹ On Snapchat, video views are counted as soon as a user starts watching a video while, on Facebook, videos auto-play and views are counted after 3 seconds.