Rio coverage strikes gold for popular mobile app
Nearly 35 million U.S. users saw Olympic highlights on Snapchat
The Summer Olympics was something of a coming-out party for Snapchat, the mobile storytelling and messaging app.
Nearly 35 million U.S. users watched highlights from the Games on a dedicated channel in Discover, the area of Snapchat where media companies publish content, and on so-called Live Stories: videos and images from athletes and fans that Snapchat editors strung together to tell more intimate stories of life in Rio.
Millions more watched athletes themselves use Snapchat to talk about their events and joke with teammates.
“Snapchat filled the void when it came to creating mobile content for this major world event,” said Aryeh Bourkoff, founder and chief executive of LionTree, a merchant bank that specializes in media and technology. “There was more Olympics footage and content on Snapchat than there was on NBC.”
Snapchat helped expand viewership for the Olympics, which hit a 16-year primetime ratings low in the U.S. on NBC. And it provided a glimpse of why the company could one day compete with television for audiences and advertising dollars.
“Snapchat is the company that will figure out how to move TV viewers to mobile,” said Hemant Taneja, a Snapchat investor and director at the venture firm General Catalyst Partners.
To keep people glued to the app, Snapchat needs a steady stream of content. To that end, last Friday the company introduced Spectacles, sunglasses with a camera embedded in the frames, to be available later this year. People can use Spectacles to take video clips and upload the footage to the Snapchat app. The new eyewear prompted the company to rename itself Snap Inc. to reflect that it now makes more than one product: the Snapchat app and Spectacles. If consumers embrace Spectacles, they will provide many more snaps for the company to select and turn into stories. Currently more than two-thirds of Snapchat’s 150 million daily users create content every day.
Since introducing Discover in January 2015, Snapchat has become a web of highly edited video content — whether made by users, celebrities or media companies such as BuzzFeed and CNN. That, in turn, has caught the attention of advertisers who want to reach Snapchat’s audience, which, the company says, includes 41 per cent of Americans ages 18-34. By comparison, the company says that the average television network in the U.S. reaches about 6 per cent of the same demographic.
Still, Snap is not the only Internet company trying to create the nextgeneration television experience.
Facebook, with more than 1 billion daily active users, and its photo-sharing app Instagram, which has over 300 million, dwarf Snapchat. Both Facebook and Instagram have aggressively moved into video recently.
Almost a third of Internet users visit YouTube, where billions of videos are viewed each day.
All of these companies hope they can lure advertisers with their video platforms.
Traditional TV commands 72 per cent of all video viewing time, and television advertising budgets haven’t shrunk significantly with the proliferation of web video, according to data from Activate, a consulting firm for tech and media companies.
To reap financial rewards, Internet companies must do more than persuade viewers to spend more time watching videos.
Television ad dollars would “flood into online” if online ads could prove they were as effective as television ads, said Joe Marchese, president of advertising products for the Fox Net- works Group. For Marchese, that means the ad takes up the full screen, probably plays with the sound on and is viewed in its entirety.
While advertisers do not go so far as to say that Snapchat video ads are equivalent to television ads, they note that watching content on Snapchat mimics the experience of watching television. Videos play with the sound on. They take up the full screen. They tell a narrative story. Users flip between them.
Snapchat says its ads and videos are more engaging because they are not “competing with family photos and other things in a stream for the viewer’s attention,” said Imran Khan, Snap’s chief strategy officer. Content-makers and advertisers “have complete, exclusive command of the user’s smartphone,” he said.
Doug Neil, Universal Pictures’ executive vice-president for digital marketing, agrees. “A full-screen experience that has the sound enabled grabs the user’s attention much better”