Snapchat is using a disingenuous metric here to count views which plays to their advantage; an advantage they wish to exploit as long as they can before their advertisers and content partners wisen up and start demanding a metric that better captures whether the content was consumed to the producer's satisfaction enough to count as an impression.

Right now, this is not as big of a concern because Snapchat's coveted demographic composition and its curated way of working with content partners and advertisers; this results in advertiser self-selection and attracts brand-oriented advertisers with big budgets and less of an acute interest in tracking ROI.

However, once those advertisers look harder at their ROI (like Procter & Gamble [1]) or Snapchat wishes to attract the sorts of SMB advertisers its competitor Facebook can readily attract onto FB and Instagram -- and even struggling Twitter can court -- Snapchat will face increasing pressure to change the way they count views. Facebook, for example, has had a 3-second cutoff before counting a video view for a while, even as they bungled the way they reported metrics [2]. Different platforms have differing definitions on what counts as a view or impression [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14879204 [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-exaggerating-view-co... [3] http://marketingland.com/whats-a-video-view-on-facebook-only...