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Snapchat released a feature that uses machine learning to stitch together snaps submitted to Our Story into a seamless video, called Crowd Surf, according toMashable.
Intended to mirror a live event experience, the feature pieces snaps together based on the time stamp and geolocation information.
Users can tap a button at the bottom of the screen to change perspectives without interrupting the viewing experience. Crowd Surf was initially tested at a San Francisco music festival last weekend, and will begin slowly rolling out at select events, according to Business Insider.
The ultimate success of Crowd Surf will hinge on Snapchat’s curation, the number of user-submitted snaps, and how many events are covered. Users may turn away from Crowd Surf if snaps are low quality, leading to a lackluster selection of content to curate to Our Story during live events. Additionally, positive effects of Crowd Surf will be small if Snap is too selective on what events it utilizes Crowd Surf for.
Nonetheless, the release of Crowd Surf can lead to increased engagement and revenue opportunities for Snapchat:
- It can help drive more views to Our Story. This in turn could help drive ad revenue, as more users viewing stories means more users are likely to be served ads. Snap’s other recent efforts to boost engagement within Stories has seen recent success — Q2 2017 saw more stories views per user than ever before, while content submitted to Our Story has already increased 30% since the launch of Snap Map. Additionally, users going to Crowd Surf in the Discover section could be exposed to other Discover content, which could also result in more ad views.
- It helps differentiate it from Instagram Stories. Instagram doesn’t have a similar feature to Crowd Surf, and Facebook hasn’t made any moves into editorial curation, according to Business Insider. Crowd Surf can help Snap separate itself from Instagram in the user-submitted Stories curation space, and this separation is important as the two platforms face vastly different user growth success — Snapchat added just 15 million daily users from Q4 2016 to Q2 2017, while Instagram Stories went from 150 million to 250 million daily users since the beginning of this year.
- The feature could pave the way for partnership deals. Snapchat could begin to form partnerships with certain artists, large music festivals, or arenas to be featured on Crowd Surf. Snapchat could draw in users to view the events on Stories, which they could then be served ads. The artist, music festival, or arena could receive a portion of the ad revenue and gain exposure to Snapchat’s 173 million daily users. Opening up this new channel of revenue is important as nearly all of Snapchat’s revenue comes from advertising, and its hardware ambitions have lagged as a reliable source of revenue.
Social networks are here to stay, and they're constantly evolving. Globally, more than 2.8 billion people — or 37% of the world's population — use social media, but the way those users interact with each other, and the platforms they adopt, vary widely.
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