Yeah, the 13-21-year-old chunk of society. Do you, as a Linux Kernel Developer, happen to be within that demographic? Even their IPO roadshow video (which I see has now been removed) talks about their "13-34-year-old" user base, and then emphasizes the far higher levels of engagement and far higher potential among the lower half of that range.
MySpace had that one nailed, and look how that turned out for them. This is exactly the kind of demographic that is susceptible to fads and keeps leaving dead services in its wake.
when it comes to social media of any type, if your grandma is using it, you don't want to be using it, since it must be for old people.
according to teenager logic, anyway.
I don't know if you remember how that went down, but people loved myspace. It worked well, then all the cool kids jumped to Facebook. It was herd mentality.
Definitely a trend situation over product features.
With network effects, you live by the sword and you die by the sword.
I would disagree, being a publishing company, a movie review company, a comic book company, video company ... these are all things Myspace was attempting, is not the same as being a music company.
It's not like Snapchat is an esoteric thing. Using it can be a function of how outgoing and expressive you are. Or if you have some purpose.
The same reason you post on Hacker News is why people post on Snapchat -- to interact with others.
I have been struck with amazement at the rise of apps like Snap, Twitter, and Instragram. They have captivated an entire generation, leaving me on the sideline. As a developer, I suppose I'm not the most social being on the planet, but it does concern me that I have become "detached" from everyone else.
I spoke with an Uber driver the other day whos 14 year old son has 700,000 instragram followers and is making money selling advertising to big brands like Target. I'm not old, but that sure as hell made me feel old...
Advertising has transformed our economy over the past century, and especially this past decade.
I’m convinced this is more of a service problem than an inherent generational problem. At the moment many of the best-in-breed applications are ad supported because their whole raison d’être revolves around network effects and making people pay in or subscribe cuts against that.
As time goes on, though, places where a subscription based business model can fit will start to catch on as the underlying technologies mature to the point where you can get any old dude out of college to run them rather than needing top-quartile development talent. This is especially true as you become able to position applications or services as ‘premium’ products.
It’s easy to make people uptake new things with freeware business models. But as the products and services get more buy-in you’ll find more scope for other business models to thrive. For example, there is a cottage industry of subscription based matchmaking services that offer a more personal touch than typical online dating.
You need to stop and see the big picture here. facebook is basically as powerful as the entire TV industry combined, with all the power concentrated in a single company. The NYT recently reported that the average US facebook user spends 50 minutes/day on facebook. And people are watching less and less TV all the time.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, quite the opposite, but I think it seems dishonest not to acknowledge what a huge effect these companies have had on every level of our society, from how people talk to friends, how politicians communicate with the electorate, how people decide what to buy, etc.
Here is one breakdown of GDP by category[2]. Even if you are generous and include all retail (6%), information (4%), and entertainment (4%), that is still only 14% of the economy. I think people forget just how much economic activity is tied to things like government, real estate, healthcare, manufacturing, etc. The poster I replied to seem to imply that social media was making up most of the economy, and I think that's demonstrably false.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/250703/forecast-of-inter...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#G...
My fiancee is an architect and I invest in real estate so I probably have a broader view of this than most (if only due to the luck of my draw/circumstances). Plus my father worked his entire career in factory operations.
Part of the problem is that HN is so software/Bay Area-centric, it's an industry cluster that pushes out a lot of traditional S&P 500 companies. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, living here, you are definitely "in a bubble" thought and perspective-wise. On the other hand, living in the bubble means you get to see what's coming next, and let's face it, the S&P 500 is backward. It's hard to appreciate how backward so much of it is, it's practically incomprehensible to the average Bay Area tech person. People overall are paid just way less, 40-hour weeks are the norm, people don't read books or retrain much, everything is done via emailed word documents and playing "did you get the latest changes" vs. VCS), etc.
Arrogant? Maybe, but you tell me how companies here can post such exceptional operational performance relative to their more "average" peers.
Healthcare is enormous. Holy crap, what, 24% of GDP?
(I'm not interested in advertising. I'm just curious.) I'm surprised by Target: Why not rotate their product lines and improve selection rather than just advertise to teens? Most of them would probably go to Walmart where it's cheaper.
I did ask how he does it though, and he said target sends him pictures to use. I was confused by that response because, I thought instagram was more about product placement (him hanging out with his friends, with target logo in the background).
TL;DR; - Not sure how it works.
Yes, that's probably it. It's the "influencer" model. If 700,000 people who are following you on social media see you wearing a cool jacket from Target, and you say something nice about it in the comments, then those people are more likely to buy that jacket than say, seeing some random person wearing it in a TV ad or a catalog.
I have a highly engaging, challenging job that pays well. I'm a holder of an advanced degree, regularly read long-form books, and am engaged and will be married soon.
Frankly I think I'm pretty typical a lot of people on HN, and developers in general. I don't consume much media, though. I entirely checked out from facebook and haven't looked back.
When I think about who the heaviest users of facebook and snapchat are, I think of people who have boring jobs that don't require their full attention: working retail in a mall, gym attendants, hotel workers, basically anyone working a minimum wage, customer-facing job with a lot of time to kill. These people tend to be young, but they also tend to be less educated and not earn that much.
Looking at my own life, I remember thinking how backward the rich were when I was young, they were late to the internet and some still don't even use email (I think Buffett does this?) It's ironic that as developers have risen in prominence and income, we may be excluding ourselves from using the very mass-market products we ourselves create. It's weird. Are we drug dealers?
Developers build the infrastructure that manufactures the drugs. The owners of that infrastructure are kingpins. The users of these platforms are drug dealers. Each follower or friend is an addict.
There is a big risk here though. Twitter has crashed and burned when compared to Facebook.
I don't see who SnapChat will lose to besides themselves (i.e. monetization). IMO Facebook/Instagram isn't well positioned win today's 13-25 demographic.
The point is, someone will win. And right now I'm not sure who else is in the running.
It honestly feels like Google is actively trying to sabotage themselves for messaging. I just don't get it.
I think duo is the right idea, where making a video call should be just as easy as making a phone call, but so far every time I've tried to use has been met with "install what? can't we just facetime?"
Yes, it's exactly that 'more difficult' I mean by 'you can't bundle them any more'. SMS and 'HoIP' with the same contact used to appear in the same conversation, but they removed the feature - disabling it for those with it enabled a priori, and disabling others from enabling it.
Seriously, outside of top 40 and hip-hop stations, I think nearly everything is geared towards older people.
OTOH, depending on how loosely or tightly you define what snapchat is ("ephemeral image communication platform", "image communication platform", "communication platform", "social media", "news aggregator"), there are huge groups of people that have never used snapchat or any competing products. There are lots of people in the US who have never used snapchat, instagram (stories), whatsapp, or even facebook messenger (the app specifically), which are the closest comparisons to snapchat. I think that's the point.
I currently have fb messenger, snapchat, groupme, and twitter on my phone. I mainly use the first 2. I've never used whatsapp or instagram at all.
"Snap Inc., formerly Snapchat, Inc., is a camera company. The Company’s flagship product, Snapchat, is a camera application that helps people to communicate through short videos and images known as a Snap. The Company offers three ways for people to make Snaps: the Snapchat application, Publishers Tools that help its partners to create Publisher Stories, and Spectacles, its sunglasses that make Snaps. Snaps are viewed primarily through the Snapchat application, but can also be embedded on the Web or on television in certain circumstances. Snapchat opens directly into the Camera, helping in creating a Snap and sending it to friends. The Company’s advertising products include Snap Ads and Sponsored Creative Tools, such as Sponsored Lenses and Sponsored Geofilters. As of December 31, 2016, on an average, 158 million people used Snapchat every day to Snap with family, watch Stories from friends, see events from around the world, and explore curated content from publishers."
But you probably have used those companies without knowing. You've probably traveled through an area with cell towers owned and operated by att and verizon. You've maybe received financing on a purchases or had financial services through a smaller bank in some way aided by chase/wells fargo/bofa. And you've never used any of pfizers commercial products? How about advil, chapstick, dimetapp, or robitussin?
i concede your point about pfizer, and i also recall that i had a bofa account in college, but i think the point still stands.
For the vast majority of Silicon Valley, this happened a long time ago. Tech valuations have been divorced from the lives people lead for quite a long time - Snap is just the first instance of this happening to people who are in the Valley, solely because of their age.
Microsoft paid something like $40/user for hotmail, and IDK what for LinkedIn (20B?). What other platform will these kids move to? Maybe Instagram, but that leaves two big, well-funded players with ~500M users down the road. Billions to create/integrate with media/virtual content.
Unless something supplants snap for the tweens, I think they've got a lot of long-term capture. Their "phones" are their universe.
Maybe I'm the type of person who doesn't need a constant glimpse at other people's lives... or maybe I already had Facebook and Instagram for that. It's likely that the same inertia will help Snap hold onto its older user-base as it matures.
The only valuable currency of the information economy is human attention, and those who harvest it most efficiently tend to command higher prices while re-selling it to advertisers, who all vie for a piece of it.
In this sense Snap, Facebook, television networks, books, Netflix, newspapers, churches, 9gag, radio stations, PlayStation Network, billboards, blogs, professional sports leagues and magazines all compete for the same currency and those who accummulate the most get to name their price.
Though I do have to remember there's a big world beyond me. John Deere has $65 billion EV. I've never use one of their products.
I don't know anyone else who uses it, but the rest of us are boring married people who don't go to bars much (and not for the same reasons if we do). A couple of the marketing guys at work send stuff out on it for the company, I gather, which is really weird to me since my impression is that it's (still) mostly used for sending clips of drunken stupidity and nude pics or hookup arrangements. They definitely don't use it to message grandma—that's what Facebook is for.
He's handy with a camera, so lots of content, introspective comments, tripod pics of his profile while staring out at the sea or what not...
Every new follower brings him a couple more.
Snapchat is useful and popular because it is a way for people to say hi to their friends without having anything to say. You just take a selfie with a filter, make a face, and you're done. This lets you feel close to your friends without having the pressure of actually having a conversation topic.
The genius of Snapchat is that because photos are ephemeral, the bar to create content is as low as it gets, which results in orders of magnitudes of more content creation and sharing compared to platforms like Instagram. On Instagram, you spend all of your time obsessing over the perfectly angled and filtered photo, hoping to get as many likes as possible. As a result, you'll post on Instagram once a week, but you'll post 5 times a day to snapchat. That's a two-orders magnitude of difference in usage, which is why Snapchat is so successful.
I guess the same is not true for the average person who buys into a public company. Because if you buy at $1 and tomorrow it is worth $.32c I do not see how you will not loose money.