The Future of Video & Snapchat
I’ve spent the last year thinking about the future of video and there is one company that is totally transforming the way we consume and share video: Snapchat. The hilarious and somewhat frustrating thing about Snapchat is just how much of a generational gap the app draws between “old” and young. Read any WSJ or NYTimes piece about it and you find yourself drudging through four paragraphs explaining just how the app works, “with a series of swipes, hidden features and a serious lack of drop down menus…” Despite non-millenial confusion there is no denying that Snapchat is entirely changing the way that people in the western world consume and consider video. Here’s why:
Some Data
Let’s look at some stats. These are Snapchat and Facebook’s vanity numbers compared.
User base:
*not drawn to scale
So, it is safe to say that Snapchat is ~7% the size of Facebook. There are rumors that they have closer to 200M users, but this still leaves their base at a fraction of Facebook’s 1.4 billion. Now lets look at videos consumed per day.
Video views per day:
*also drawn by hand, not to scale
This is staggering. Snapchat’s total videos viewed daily is half of Facebook’s, despite having a very small use base in comparison. Yes, Snapchat videos include messages from one user to another, but Snapchat stories account for much of Snapchat’s usage and they are a one to many broadcast like a Facebook newsfeed post. Given this level of video consumption Snapchat is a massive player to be reckoned with.
It’s All About The Ecosystem
Next let’s look at creators. YouTube, the UGC video incumbent and one of the biggest, most important players in the online video landscape, is the host to a plethora of creators who have made personal fortunes, or at least a bit of money, producing videos. The rise of creators and their power in media is a blog post unto itself, but YouTube has proven that real fame and fortune can be achieved through a web or mobile application. Rumor has it that the team at Facebook is beefing up their video offering and trying to do so, in part, by winning over famous YouTube creators. Facebook’s potential to become a lucrative, creat0r-friendly platform has yet to be seen.
Snapchat, though seven years younger than Facebook, is already becoming a creator powerhouse. Snapchat has both grown its own and adopted numerous influencers from YouTube, Vine and Instagram. Jerome Jarre, the Vine star with 8.5M followers, moved to Snapchat in the last 2–3 months and deleted all of his vines — a bold move, perhaps the result of his transition to a new platform.
Creators love Snapchat: it provides next level intimacy with fans, allowing a two-way dialog along with the extremely effective one-to-many story. Views are trackable, but unlike other apps videos are gone within a day. Ephemeral video is closer to the original concept of television: content aired once a week that requires attendance in a specific time frame in order to participate. This creates a different sense of community, continuity and experience than content that is always available.
Snapchat: Fast & Furious
Snapchat is moving faster and with more agility than every other player in the market today, and perhaps surprisingly, it bears a resemblance to early YouTube. When YouTube was acquired in 2006, as a ~1.5 year old company, it was one of the fastest growing sites on the Internet, with about 20M MAU, 100 million video views per day and a #5 rank on Alexa. The majority of users were ages 12–17. Snapchat is one of the fastest growing apps today, ranking squarely in the #5–6 spot on the iOS and Play stores. 63% of users are under 25. Video usage already dwarfs early YouTube, in part due to the rise of the Internet and mobile.
Unlike early YouTube, and unlike present Facebook, Snapchat is already moving quickly and carefully into video advertising. What became clear from Evan Spiegel’s attendance at Cannes is that Snapchat is very serious about advertising and is already moving fast with those who are willing to pay. YouTube ads are a barrier to content and users chose to skip them whenever possible. Facebook video advertising doesn’t really exist yet: small experiments have been done but the social network is moving slowly. Snapchat’s 3V ad strategy is fast and furious. Fast because they have already gone to market, furious because if you watch these videos of Evan Spiegal explaining how Snapchat works and what 3V is, he seems kind of angry (HT Techcrunch). And finally, fast and furious because Furious 7 was actually one of the first movies advertised in Snapchat stories. ;)
All in all, Snapchat is sitting at the center of a major shift in the way our current and future world consumes media. I’m doing an experiment with my colleague Ambar to share a little bit of life in VC via Snapchat stories. If you’d like to watch me embarrass myself with weekly posts, my Snapchat user name is cecih, and my QR code is below. Feel free to send me feedback or thoughts on Twitter (@cecistalls), as well!
