Snapchat is an extremely popular social media platform, particularly among people between the ages of 15 and 25. In this particular app, viewers are able to view the section the app calls "stories." These stories are only available to be viewed up to twenty-four hours after being posted. Users are able to post events throughout their day as well as see what everyone else has done during their day, and with their 218 million daily active users, there is a lot of content available in this section of the app.
These stories are timed, which only gives the viewer a few seconds to view the content after opening any given story. This is the basis on which Snapchat developed their app. Danah Boyd, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, explained in her blog that "When someone sends you an image/video via Snapchat, they choose how long you get to view the image/video. The underlying message is simple: You’ve got 7 seconds. PAY ATTENTION. And when people do choose to open a Snap, they actually stop what they’re doing and look." While a user can simply scroll through Instagram or Facebook and not have their full attention on what they are viewing, Snapchat users have to focus solely on what they are viewing in order to understand what the message is behind the information. And according to an infographic from Digital Information World, "the average page visit lasts less than a minute, and users often leave the web pages in just ten to twenty seconds." This means that the seven second photo or video will be able to capture the viewers' attention for just long enough to view the information without losing interest.
News companies took advantage of this by creating their own stories on the app in order to reach a much larger audience. While fewer and fewer people are turning to newspapers, magazines, tv shows, etc. for their news, companies have turned to social media to inform their audience. These news companies are then able to inform viewers with shorter attention spans or less time to receive news the "old fashioned way" by capturing their attention for just enough time to view their full story before moving on to a different story.
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