Snapchat story strikes a chord
Social media app’s feature on Coachella draws over 40 million views, CEO tweets.
Snapchat hasn’t revealed many usage statistics over the last year, but Chief Executive Evan Spiegel let out a little tidbit Monday, saying that more than 40 million users watched the Coachella “Our Story” on the social media app over the weekend.
For comparison, Sunday’s final round of the Masters golf tournament peaked at 17.7 million viewers, according to CBS. Spiegel shared the Snapchat statistic in a Twitter post alongside an emoji of a monkey with its hands over its eyes, apparently in joyous disbelief.
The Our Story features, which are videos pieced together by Snapchat workers from photos and videos that users in a certain area capture and submit via the app, could grow lucrative for the Los Angeles start-up. Our Story is one of the few areas in the app where Snapchat has experimented with showing ads.
For instance, stories tied to the Final Four of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament included ads for Coke Zero, Powerade and the “Furious 7” movie. People who said their footage was included in stories during March Madness wrote on Twitter that their clips received upward of 1 million views in just a couple of hours.
At a conference last fall, Spiegel said — without divulging specific figures — that viewership for Our Story rivaled that of college football TV broadcasts. Snapchat’s value to advertisers, though, is that 71% of its adult audience is age 34 or younger, a higher proportion than other major social media apps, such as Instagram and Tumblr, according to ComScore. On Monday, the story for Coachella’s first weekend featured shots of fans entranced by electronic music DJ Kaskade, the onstage kiss between stars Madonna and Drake and farewell messages as fans returned home.
Nearly 600,000 people were expected at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival over two weekends.