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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised (rather, disappointed) that the article doesn't make any comparisons to Facebook's IPO. For today's 14-to-25-year-olds, Snapchat is the new Facebook, in terms of user engagement, market penetration, mindshare -- so it stands to reason in terms of valuation it would be too.

There are some important differences, of course. Facebook owns multiple properties that mount competition to Snap Inc: Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp, the original Facebook; Snapchat subsumes all these usecases in a single app that you'd be hard-pressed not to find on a teen's phone today. And it does so by making it optional to curate a permanent, indexable, discoverable, idealized public identity.

To many, that's strictly better than anything Facebook has put out -- a company that nonetheless commanded a high valuation, performed an IPO (albeit rocky), and now posts a strong profit.

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I disagree in the similarities of Facebook. Snapchat is like twitter but worse. Because it's anonymous and not associated with real names, they don't have an actual relationship graph, unlike twitter they don't have an interest graph. All they really have is your location. Everything is ephemeral so it's going to be even harder to figure out what type of advertising they should actually target. Also we don't know where people spend most of their time in private messages or stories and the only thing they really are focusing on monetizing is stories. Also like Twitter their advertising system can be subverted. Brands and advertisers will go directly to influencers to peddle their products vs going through snapchat. Also at the time Facebook was yet to introduce advertising on their mobile product. I believe Snapchat will have a much harder road to monetization than Facebook had.

> and the only thing they really are focusing on monetizing is stories

Lenses are big business.

I'll believe it when I see it

Where is the data supporting this statement?

"For today's 14-to-25-year-olds, Snapchat is the new Facebook, in terms of user engagement, market penetration, mindshare"

I'm not saying it's untrue; I would just like to see some reliable data to back this up. Anecdotally; most of the teens I know are using Instagram rather than Snapchat, whereas the people I know using Snapchat are in their mid 20s to mid 30s.

Good idea.

Fortune's April article [1] on the investment firm Piper Jaffray's 'Taking Stock with Teens' survey [2] shows that in their Spring 2016 survey Snapchat has tied or surpassed Instagram for most important social network among teens; the article includes a graph of the last 3 surveys. Mediakix, which specializes in social influencer marketing, publishes periodic assessments aimed for marketers about the social networks -- with sources. In January they compared Bloomberg and Fortune articles to conclude that Snapchat's video views surpassed those of Facebook [3].

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/04/13/snapchat-instagram-piper-jaffr... [2] http://www.piperjaffray.com/3col.aspx?id=4035 [3] http://mediakix.com/2016/01/snapchat-statistics-2016-markete...

Thanks

>There are some important differences, of course.

I'm surprised you wouldn't bring the biggest difference - the data. Facebook had tons of user data, even at their IPO, while Snap has relatively little.

Facebook owns PII data -- data the user attests -- and user engagement data. Snapchat just has user engagement data -- data derived from the user's behavior. This is a notable difference, but frankly, at this point in time it doesn't matter: every potential advertiser worth their salt knows that the average Snapchat user is between 14-25. Both services usually know location.

To many advertisers, the Facebook ad platform's sophisticated audience analysis isn't so much value-add as a way to prune people unlikely to be interested from being shown your ads. This is why the comparisons between Snapchat and MTV are apt.

Profile information can be useful for the platform itself, since they can use it to target specific ads to people who are most likely to engage with them (watch video, click through or do something else). Since there is only limited space for ads available, being successful with this might be quite important.

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