Snapchat Launches Search for Stories | Wallaroo Media

Snapchat Launches “Search” for Stories, Changing the Game for Real-time Video Content

Today Snapchat announced the new Search function for Stories. Snapchat stated that they will be rolling this out slowly. Currently, over 1 million professionally curated and unique Stories are available in search. Snap says in their announcement that these Stories include “…a local basketball game, check out the scene at your favorite bar, view your favorite Fashion Week shows, get inspired by a faraway place, or simply tap through a Story full of puppies — there’s a Story for everything!” Here’s their explainer:

How Search for Stories Changes the Game

Josh Constine from TechCrunch has a great take on this. He wrote: “Snapchat is shifting from a social network limited to content shared by people you follow to an ephemeral, real-time database of what’s going on now everywhere…It makes Snapchat as deep as whatever the world is sharing, creating near-infinite rabbit holes to go down, and a stronger competitor for YouTube & Twitter.”

What this also changes is the length of time a Snap is available. From its inception until yesterday, Snaps have had a 24 hour lifespan. But with the introduction of Search, Snap said that some Snaps will be available for less than 24 hours, while others will be visible for weeks or even a few months.

snapchat stories youtube twitter competitor

As of now, Snapchat is pulling from captions or visual recognition via machine learning to add Snaps to categories and into Stories Search. But down the road, they could utilize music in the background or voice recognition as further classification methods.

Snapchat vs. YouTube

YouTube was originally built for the web. As such, most of its videos are long-form (30 seconds to several minutes) in comparison to Snaps (7-10 seconds). YouTube’s videos are also generally delayed at least a few hours, if not more, from when they’re recorded. Snapchat’s video content is posted in real-time.

Because of how YouTube’s platform is designed, and the fact that videos hosted there never disappear, it incentivizes its users to take more time on the production and editing side of things. Since Snapchat is focused on what is happening in real-time (and a 24-hour lifespan), its users are more accustomed to sharing raw, instant content.

Another good point by Josh at TechCrunch in the same article is that this could potentially position Snapchat as a competitor to Twitter. “If you want to read what people are saying around a topic in real time, today you search Twitter. But now if you want to SEE what people are capturing with their cameras around a topic in real time, you can search Snapchat.” I don’t totally agree with that, as video clips are posted to Twitter constantly, but we’ll see how this progresses.

At Wallaroo, we’re extremely bullish on Snapchat. This new Search feature only increases that. As Kerry Flynn wrote on Mashable today, “Snapchat is where my friends are – yes, my real friends.” What better place to market and advertise?! If you want to learn more about Snapchat advertising, click here. Want to run some ads there? Contact us today!

Author

Brandon Doyle

CEO + Founder