Last week saw Snapchat become a public company, revealing some key audience usage figures in the process… including a huge audience for its NFL content.
The popular chat app claimed that 42 million people watched its NFL content this season, up from 30 million during the 2015-2016 season.
NFL was the first sports league to appear on the Discover section of Snapchat, giving users a way to access football content daily.
Alongside the Discover channel, Snapchat created geofilters for each NFL team and lenses for the Super Bowl. Snapchat says the lenses it created for Super Bowl Sunday, which let users apply Pats or Falcons helmets to their selfies, were seen more than 67 million times.
Even in the off-season, Snapchat will continue to provide fans with content from the NFL Combine and the draft in April.
“With Snapchat, we saw this company that was growing quickly and it was reaching this growing audience of young people,” said Blake Stuchin, NFL’s VP-digital media business development. “And it’s a very engaged audience of young people and a different form factor than you see in other places.”
Snapchat has literally upended digital media, forcing brands and publishers to shoot vertically for video on mobile phones, a format most people shunned before the app came along.
It also pioneered augmented reality with animated filters called lenses, which people place on top of their video selfies, altering the image with a playful graphic.
Snapchat also created a section where publishing partners like the NFL curate daily channels, and they sell ads amid the content.
The National Football League had been one of Snapchat’s closest sports collaborators, since it first showed highlights from the 2015 draft to people on the app. Last year, the league started posting videos from inside select games to live stories in Snapchat, offering an inside perspective on game day from the sidelines and the stands.
The messaging and media app shared the numbers ahead of its public offering on Thursday, offering a glimpse into one of its key media relationships, which brings content and ad revenue to the platform.
Snapchat went public with close to 160 million daily users and $400 million in ad sales in 2016, and it was valued at almost $30 billion once its stock started trading — that’s more than double what Twitter is worth on Wall Street.