How Snapchat wants to earn money (by establishing vertical videos)

Snapchat is worth 15-19 billion dollars. An insane number, making everybody ask: How the hell is this possible, why has a little app that simply shows images (and videos) for a few seconds (and then “deletes” them) the same net value than international banks, airlines and hotel groups  that have thousands of employees ?

This is for sure just a theoretical value, but a realistic one: Snapchat has 100 million users, and Snapchat has – unintendly – established a standard for quick & dirty (ha!) semi-private/public sharing of pictures and videos, with a nice side-effect: They made vertical video popular and accepted. Shooting vertical videos (accidently) was and still is a big pain in the ass for web video, as every professional video hosting platform shows videos in a horizontal format. Snapchat is about to change that, from user-generated media to highly professional broadcasting. This might be the turning point where advertisement companies and movie studios will have to create vertical versions of ads and trailers too.

TL;DR Some days ago, Snapchat’s CEO announced that he wants to monetarize the platform via vertical advertisement videos. This might be the start of vertical video as a serious format for mainstream media and web developers. According to undefined sources the interaction rate on vertical videos is 9x higher than on horizontal videos. Game-changer!

Also interesting: Video about Vertical Video Syndrome: