Snapchat was to host a new 24-hour countdown on New Year’s Eve yesterday.
The app with ephemeral messages that is popular with people younger than 25, but relatively obscure to the over-45 set was to document the final moments of last year with a very public global presentation.
A team of Snapchat curators were to stitch together photographs and videos from the app’s users at celebrations in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates; New York City; St Petersburg, Russia; and other posts around the world to create a documentary-like view of how people experienced New Year’s Eve.
Users would be able to see the piece in the “Live” section of the app. Snapchat also planned to distribute the New Year’s Eve story to video screens in Times Square, the first time that the service sent content from its app to another medium.
After 24 hours, that entire story — just like the New Year’s Eve champagne, confetti and fireworks — would disappear.
“It is very much in the moment,” Snapchat chief operating officer Emily White said. “That is part of the excitement about it. It is the chance to be part of something that is happening now.”
The initiative underscores Snapchat’s under-the-radar, but fast-growing prominence on the media landscape, especially among teenagers and young adults.
STORIES
The app started about three-and-a-half years ago as a service that allowed people to send pictures that would disappear seconds after being viewed.
Over the past 15 months, Snapchat has evolved into a mobile broadcasting service. The app introduced a feature in October 2013 called “Stories,” which allows people to create image and video compilations about their daily lives and broadcast them to friends or all Snapchat users. The stories disappear after 24 hours.
“It sort of serves as a flip book of the last 24 hours of a person’s life,” White said.
In June, Snapchat unveiled its “Our Story” feature, which compiles photos and videos from live events that users make available to create a collective story. Besides the New Year’s Eve story, some recent entries included the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the US National Dog Show and the Diwali holiday in India.
This week’s New Year’s Eve “Our Story” was set to be the biggest yet, with the service expecting to sift through hundreds of hours of photos and videos to create the piece.
“For everyone who is not there, they get a chance to see what is happening,” White said. “For everyone who is there, they get a chance to be a citizen journalist and help tell the story.”
Marketers and media companies alike are trying to figure out how to embrace this so-called ephemeral trend. Some marketers have started experimenting with advertising on the service. Several media companies are reported to be in discussions with Snapchat about figuring out ways to broadcast their content onto the service.
With 25.3 million unique visitors in the US, Snapchat has a small fraction of the audience of more established social networking services like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook counts 200.7 million unique visitors in the US; and Twitter and Instagram have 80 million to 90 million each, according to the measurement business comScore.
YOUNG AUDIENCE
However, Snapchat is growing much faster, surging 55 percent in the past year, and its audience skews much younger. Nearly three-quarters of its users are younger than 35, with about 45 percent aged 18 to 24, comScore said.
ComScore does not track users younger than 18, so the actual audience for Snapchat is probably larger, given its popularity among teenagers.
Snapchat’s New Year’s Eve story does not include an advertiser, but the company is working with beauty brand CoverGirl and billboard advertising company Clear Channel Outdoor to broadcast the story onto two of the screens that CoverGirl has bought in Times Square.
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