Snapchat could beat Facebook before Facebook beats YouTube

We’ve been focusing so much on how Facebook is catching up to YouTube that we didn’t notice how Snapchat is actually becoming a video behemoth as well. Facebook recently announced that it doubled its daily video views to eight billion in just seven months, but it looks like Snapchat is growing even faster by tripling its daily video views to six billion in just six months. To be fair, Snapchat’s video content is a lot different than Facebook’s, and is generally only a few seconds long, but six billion is an impressive number no matter how you put it. 

Snapchat has continuously added new features over the past year, and it looks like it is paying off. Snaps and videos in the app are now being viewed over six billion times a day. That’s a massive three times increase from just this past May, when the company told Bloomberg that it was serving two billion views daily. The company confirmed the six billion views figure to The Financial Times in a report published this weekend. To put that number in perspective, Facebook announced just this past week that the social network is handling over eight billion video views each day. Facebook has recently placed extra focus on its video offerings, and that figure represents a two-times increase from April. Comparing internal statistics is tricky, particularly for web videos. How long does someone have to watch a video for it to count as a “view”? For Facebook, that number is three seconds, while for Snapchat, it’s reported that just a few milliseconds will suffice. There’s also the differing nature of the content on each of these sites. Snapchat’s videos are just seconds long, while many Facebook videos are closer to a minute or more in length. YouTube, meanwhile, features lots of content that’s hours long. Google now measures usage on its video site by hours and not views, but it counted four billion views daily back in the spring.