Big difference between what snapchat counts as a "view" - just opening a single video - and actually viewing the program, as in watching it for more than second.
Would be interesting to see what 29MM viewers converts into number of minutes of actually viewed content.
But hey, as a vanity metric, 29MM is impressive! =]
Snapchat is using a disingenuous metric here to count views which plays to their advantage; an advantage they wish to exploit as long as they can before their advertisers and content partners wisen up and start demanding a metric that better captures whether the content was consumed to the producer's satisfaction enough to count as an impression.
Right now, this is not as big of a concern because Snapchat's coveted demographic composition and its curated way of working with content partners and advertisers; this results in advertiser self-selection and attracts brand-oriented advertisers with big budgets and less of an acute interest in tracking ROI.
However, once those advertisers look harder at their ROI (like Procter & Gamble [1]) or Snapchat wishes to attract the sorts of SMB advertisers its competitor Facebook can readily attract onto FB and Instagram -- and even struggling Twitter can court -- Snapchat will face increasing pressure to change the way they count views. Facebook, for example, has had a 3-second cutoff before counting a video view for a while, even as they bungled the way they reported metrics [2]. Different platforms have differing definitions on what counts as a view or impression [3].
When they turned pictures into videos it started to make sense to autoplay them. The only reason for that is higher video ad revenue vs static pictures.
We use minutes watched at my company to talk about how much screen time content has as it's much more compelling and accurate than 'views' imo. We just hit 7 Billion minutes watched for last 30 days.
Not sure I agree. Lots of 1-3 second views can easily add up but as an advertiser I'd laugh if you tried to say they were quality views unless you had your logo/CTA at the very beginning. Avg. View duration is just as important to look at, and just as important to compare against the timing of the messaging.
Would be interesting to see what 29MM viewers converts into number of minutes of actually viewed content.
But hey, as a vanity metric, 29MM is impressive! =]