• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 29, 2016

During the Oscars on Sunday, Snapchat let anyone view a stream of live snaps from its Web site. The social powerhouse had never before broadcast a Live Story beyond the borders of its mobile app.

At the risk of diminishing its cool factor among young users, the change could introduce Snapchat to far larger audiences.

Snapchat is not saying how often it plans to stream live content online, but Oscar night Live Story was clearly a trial run.

Plus, Snapchat has already shown a unique willingness to change course -- and eat humble pie when products and services don’t appear to playing well with users and advertisers.

For example, the social sensation recently pressed pause on its original content efforts, shelving Snap Channel. It also disbanded the 15-person team behind the quasi-content studio.

More recently, Snapchat decided to close its Lens store. Lens are still widely available on the service -- Snapchat just stopped charging a 99 cents fee to buy them.

In a similarly adjustment this past summer, Snapchat scrapped its famous press-and-hold method for viewing content. Rather, the company reshaped what was probably its most distinguishing characteristic and began letting users simply tap to view snaps and stories.

The adjustments appear to be paying off.

Indeed, Snapchat is reportedly clocking 6 billion video views a day, which represents a 300% increase since May. Those numbers aren’t far off from the 8 billion daily video views that Facebook presently sees across mobile and desktop.

The numbers are even more impressive when you consider that Snapchat claims around 100 million daily active users, which is less than one-tenth of Facebook’s 1.01 billion daily active users.