Snapchat's Untold Story

Snapchat boasts 100 million daily users, has captured the rapt attention of the media and advertising worlds - and is wildly misunderstood. Heres what everyone is missing.

- Austin Carr

​We the millennials, bro!”

Kanye West is 10 minutes and 43 seconds into his mesmerizingly elliptical sermon at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, and he’s showing no signs of relenting. MTV producers had allotted just two minutes for his Vanguard Award acceptance speech. West burned through that time onstage with muted mugging alone, bathing in “Yeezy! Yeezy!” chants from the downtown Los Angeles crowd before kicking off his homily by yelling, “Bro! Broooooooooo! Listen to the kids!” Pontificating on, well, everything—art, brands, culture, ego, Justin Timberlake, the future—West might as well be giving a TED talk on the seemingly inexplicable nature of what attracts the millennial and postmillennial audience that he’s speaking to, for, and about. Finally, he wraps up, announces his candidacy for the presidency in 2020, and drops the mic.

Inside the celebrity-packed theater, I watch as attendees lose circulation in their arms from holding their smartphones aloft, the Snapchat app’s camera open, to film the spectacle from every angle. It’s exactly the kind of epic scene Snapchat is so adept at capturing. Thanks to a partnership with MTV’s parent, Viacom, the company has a team of six here. They’re racing around to shoot and curate a Live Story of the VMAs, a feature that stitches together images and videos generated by both users and Snapchat itself.