Snapchat Considers Losing A Finger

You might not have to hold your finger on the screen to view your snaps in the future, says CEO Evan Speigel.

“It’s annoying to hold your finger there,” said Spiegel, talking about the difficulty of longer video content on Snapchat. Because there’s a screenshot API now, Spiegel says that their initial ‘hack’ of having a user hold a finger on the screen to prevent screenshotting is no longer necessary. This could open up the door to longer form content in video or other kinds of media. He was reluctant to confirm directly that you wouldn’t have to hold your finger on the screen to view your snaps in the future, he did say it ‘could be’ in the cards.

The finger-on-the-screen mechanic, which forces a user to explicitly interact with photos and videos to watch them, has been a core part of Snapchat from the beginning. So removing that requirement could significantly change the way it engages users. I’m of the mind that this intimacy actually acts as a flywheel for Snapchat’s reportedly high engagement rates, so this could be interesting. It’s also a powerful selling tool when Snapchat goes to advertisers to tell them that they can literally make users touch their ads while watching stories.

Spiegel also said that it has 100M daily active users in developed markets, and 65% of those users are creating content daily as well.

Spiegel was talking in an interview today at the Code conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

In a recent interview, Spiegel said that more than 60% of all-important 13-34 year-old smartphone users in the U.S. are active on the service. And they watch more than 2B videos every day there. Those numbers mean that Snapchat (which is 1/10th the size of Facebook) video usage is very high. This means that one person on Snapchat watches five videos for every one person on FB. Investors are so impressed with those numbers that they invested $485M more in Snapchat in December (which had just raised a few months earlier at a $100M valuation). This ‘rolling round’ has left them flush with cash and options — making them willing to experiment with things like ad formats and Snapchat Discover.

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