A recent report indicated that Snapchat users are watching more and more fresh videos on its platform each day. Its current tally is 10 billion videos a day as reported in Bloomberg.
For a company that started out as just a simple way to share disappearing selfies with friends, that is quite an incredible growth streak.
A year ago, the video traffic of the platform was only less than half of what it has right now. In April 2015, its video views per day were about 4 billion, according to the Financial Times.
But it climbed to 6 billion video views in November. By February it went up to 8 billion, effectively matching the latest video figures of Facebook. Clearly, there is a video war going on between the two platforms.
While Facebook has started to push for more eyes-on-screens by launching its new livestreams last year, Snapchat is going for its "stories" feature to attract eyeballs.
With Snapchat's "stories", users can string together a series of short 10-second-or-less video clips. These strings can be watched for one day on the app before they are taken out (which is what happens to all videos on the platform).
Certainly, Snapchat doesn't have over a billion active users that Facebook has, but it is certainly becoming the choice for social media use of the youngest app users. According to the company, over 60 percent of smartphone users with ages from 13 to 34 use its disappearing video and photo-sharing app.
Among teenagers, Snapchat beats every other social media platform, including Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, according to Piper Jaffrey, an investment firm.
The semi-annual study "Taking Stock With Teens" conducted by the investment company surveyed 6,350 U.S. teenagers whose average age is 17 years old. Snapchat took 28 percent of the votes of those surveyed as the most important social networking site.
