Snapchat video reaches 6 billion views a day

Messaging app Snapchat announced it is generating 6 billion video views every day. The number is three times the number of daily views in May.

According to Financial Times, Snapchat's daily video views is closing the gap with Facebook in the social networks battle. Facebook announced last week that its generating 8 billion video views every day, which has doubled from 4 billion in April.

What makes Snapchat's video views interesting is that the numbers are entirely made up of smartphone users. Snapchat's video is not available for desktop while Facebook's video includes both desktop and mobile views.

But comparing web video's statistics is difficult, according to The Verge. For facebook, to count as a "view", someone has to watch the video for three seconds. While for Snapchat, just a few milliseconds of watching a video can be counted as a "view".

Google measures usage on its video site by hours and not views. The site counted four billion views daily. And YouTube prefers to track views in hours.

There is also the difference in video sizes among web video apps. YouTube has lots of contents that are hours long, Facebook's videos area about a minute or more in length while Snapchat's are just few seconds long.

Snapchat's videos are much shorter than other platforms. It charges advertisers for a video that play for fractions of seconds. Snapchat offers "sponsored lens" ad format that allows the advertisers to add digital stickers to users video messages to promote their products.

According to Venture Beat, Snapchat is appealing to advertisers who interested in moving their TV budgets to the more engaging mobile platforms. The photo messaging app is also appealing to brands and studios who are exploring the potential of original digital content for the audience.

The online video ad market in the U.S. is projected to grow 33.8% this year to $7.7 billion. By 2019, U.S. advertisers will be spending $14.4 billion on online video ads. Snapchat generates $100 million in revenue on an annualized basis.

Introduced in 2011, Snapchat messaging app allows the users to control on how long their friends can view the message. The message then disappears after the specific time set by the users. The company is currently expanding its sales in Europe and will open its new office in London.

Snapchat has more than 100 million daily active users. It has made numerous changes to its product. The company launched its Stories feature following its private service for sending short video messages to specific friends.

The Stories feature quickly became Snapchat's popular service as it expanded to coverage of live events. Snapchat has also added other features like Replays, Rewinds, Stickers, and more.