(Telecompaper) The number of videos viewed on the Snapchat social messaging app has tripled since May to 6 billion a day, people close to the company told the Financial Times. The company confirmed the figure but would not comment further. Facebook announced during the week of 2 November that it had 8 billion daily video views, twice as many as in April. Snapchat's usage figure is for smartphone users, while Facebook's includes desktop and mobile. Video market leader YouTube has over 1 billion active users and 'billions of views' every day. Snapchat has mroe than 100 million daily active users. The company launched a new ad format called 'sponsored lenses' in October which allows marketers to promote their products by adding digital stickers to users' video messages. Digital video revenues are forecast to rise by 42 percent to USD 7.5 billion in the US thid year, according to eMarketer. Forrester Research projects that ad spending on digital videos in the US will rise to USD 12.6 billion by 2019.