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Sounds like twitter: interesting, perhaps the future, but not a business worth investment. How can they succeed where twitter failed? The ads have ruined the app. Everyone I know who uses it agrees it performs terribly and is extremely difficult to avoid unwanted, irrelevant ads.

Again: it's twitter.

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It's a better case than twitter though. There is no obvious way of monetizing twitter, while there are many ways that I can think of that snapchat can monetized. For example, Line and Kakao have massively succeeded with their sticker/character business, and snapchat could bring something similar. There are many other ways I can list. So, the issue is not "What are possible methods of monetization?" but "How do I optimize profit?" This is definitely a more favorable setting than twitter.

So 4B for a selling stickers business model?

Kakao's business model history is actually rather fascinating, and they keep grabbing sizeable market shares in unlikely or previously inexpressive markets to great success.

> In 2012, KakaoTalk's $42 million revenue is broken down to 67.5% ($31.1M) gaming, 26.2% ($12.1M) advertising, and 6.3% ($2.8M) emoticon sales. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KakaoTalk#Company_Business_Mod...

$200MM rev is crumbs when you're taking billions. I don't think this provides a good example of how it can work.

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