Snapchat triples daily video views to 6B in six months

Just a matter of time before Snapchat sees more video views than Facebook!

We've been talking for a while about how important video is becoming for Facebook, and how it's trying to rival YouTube by becoming a content creation hub.

There's another service, though, that is now threatening to take over both of them.

Over the weekend, Snapchat confirmed to the Financial Times that it now has over six billion videos viewed on its platform every day. That is a number that has tripled in just six months, when it had two billion views a day back in May.

That is some extremely impressive growth, and it means that sooner, rather than later, Snapchat will likely overtake Facebook's video numbers. In a conference call, following the release of Facebook's third quarter earnings last week, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook saw more than eight billion daily video views, and more than 500 million people watching daily.

"Over the next few years, video is going to be some of the most engaging content online, and by continuing to innovate here, we have a chance to build the best place to watch and share videos," he said.

It should be noted that Facebook was serving four billion video views every single day as of June, so it doubled its views in the last five months. So Facebook is no slouch in this area, Snapchat is just growing faster.

This has to be especially frustrating for the company, though, given how hard it has worked in the video arena to build up those numbers, including the purchase of online video distribution and ad-platform LiveRail and video infrastructure company QuickFire Networks.

It debuted a new algorithm, one that allows the company to get the best videos in front of its users at all times, even if that user takes no actions such as liking, sharing or commenting. Most recently Facebook launched a new dedicated video feed, where users can exclusively watch video.

The feed includes videos that have been saved for later, as well as videos from friends, Pages that users follow, and other video publishers on Facebook.

Yet, despite all of this, here comes Snapchat stealing its thunder.

There have been some questions raised about what actually makes a video view. For example, a view on YouTube means it has to be watched 30 seconds. On Facebook it has to be at least 3 seconds. With Snapchat it is said to be less than a second. So it looks like not all of these platforms are playing on an equal playing field.

What cannot be denied is that Snapchat is the only social network in the last ten years to actively threaten Facebook on any conceivable level.

Last month, speaking at our Splash LA event, Jeremy Liew, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, spoke about Snapchat's vision of being the anti-Facebook.

"One of the things that Evan talked about, even back then, and this I think is common knowledge now, is the performance anxiety of being on Facebook. How it's sort of a highlight reel of your life. If something doesn't make you look the way you want to look, then you don't put it on Facebook. He was talking about that concept years ago, it was a very interesting conversation," Liew said.

Snapchat made a famous decision to turn down a huge amount of money to become a part of Facebook. Now the company is beating the old stalwart at its own game.

VatorNews has reached out to Snapchat for confirmation and further comment. We will update this story f we learn more.

(Image source: linkedin.com)