Almost 50 million people have watched the Olympic Games on Snapchat so far, "as broadcasters including NBC and the BBC use the app to reach a millennial audience," according to Hannah Kuchler of the FINANCIAL TIMES. Nearly one in three daily Snapchat users has viewed the clips in Live Stories, "showing that the app could challenge other social sites such as Facebook and Twitter for dominance in live events." The L.A.-based start-up partnered with seven broadcasters showing in countries including the U.S., the U.K. and Brazil, to show stories that include footage from the Games and "from the crowds in the last 24 hours." In the first seven days to last Thursday, 49 million unique visitors viewed Olympics content on Snapchat, "almost a third" of the 150 million daily active users of the app. Snapchat also signed a deal with NBC, the official U.S. broadcaster of the Olympics, and news site BuzzFeed "to create a channel on its Discover platform to produce daily snippets" from the Games. Snapchat "is trying to compete with larger rivals Twitter and Facebook to become the home for social interactions surrounding live events." More than 10 billion videos are now watched on Snapchat every day, compared with 8 billion on Facebook, "when the latter last disclosed the metric earlier this year" (FT, 8/15).
