It's time to stop thinking of Snapchat as a messaging app.
It's been a video platform, perfectly crafted for mobile, since last year's release of Stories, which lets users (from your friends to Snapchat megastars) post a string of photos and videos that stays live for 24 hours. Our Story, a similar feature, brings together a collaborative stream of people's snapshots from big events like college football games or Electric Daisy Carnival.
Snapchat's Stories can be creative, fast-paced, intimate or slapstick. In essence, they're public videos that often run several minutes long -- not that any of the users glued to their screens feel time dragging by. And in June, they officially overtook messages as the app's most popular content.
And Stories will soon play host to ads, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said Wednesday at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco.
"People are going to see the first ads on Snapchat soon," Spiegel said. "We’re cutting through the new technology around ads to the core of it, which is telling a story.
Spiegel's comments suggested the ads won't be placed on personal messages but would run on Stories or Our Stories. Users will be able to skip the ads, he said.
Messages may have been Snapchat's early product, but Stories are where it could come to prominence, its power users say. Jerome Jarre, a Vine star who has become a Snapchat devotee (with 1 million followers), understands first-hand its influence with teens and young adults.
The publicly posted Stories allow Jarre, a super-smiley 24-year-old Frenchman, to post something and have it reach hundreds of thousands of fans in minutes. He uses it to post videos of his daily life -- taking his mother, a former pilot, on a plane ride for her birthday, or asking fans to meet him in Union Square. (Hundreds of screaming fans showed up.)
For popular users, crafting a Snapchat story is already an art -- one that shows up as video on millions of users' cell phones, beckoning to be watched. Just hold your finger down on the screen and you're immediately watching it.
"I think Snapchat has the power to be the YouTube on mobile," Jarre told Forbes.
(If you're not convinced, watch YouTube star Casey Neistat's video on Jarre and Snapchat. It's an excellent primer on how far Snapchat has come from its sexting-scaremongering days.)
Snapchat already has advertising, in a way. Brands were quick to leap onto a teen-heavy platform to promote themselves. Jarre and other Snapchat stars like Shaun "Shonduras" McBride have already been paid tens of thousands of dollars for a single campaign for a movie premiere or a Disneyland event.
Soon, it looks like more brands will have to build up Snapchat-tailored advertising. And as Snapchat continues to prioritize video-like Stories and support it with advertising, it's getting one step closer to what Jarre predicted: YouTube for the mobile age.
