Snap Inc. Reports First Quarter 2017 Results
investor.snap.com
investor.snap.com
> Adjusted Ebitda Loss $188.2M, Est. Loss $176.9M
> 1Q Daily Active Users 166M, Est. 168M
> 1Q Rev. $149.6M, Est. $158.6M
> 1Q Loss/Shr $2.31
I'm guessing the big issue is the miss on Daily active users. This is the same thing that caused the street ot hammer twitter.
Rule of thumb for non profitable tech companies....
If you are a company that isn't making a profit and you continually preach look at the users, look at the users. and then fail to even hit your target on that, you're going to get punished.....heavily.
Or put another way, you can either make a profit or make your non GAAP numbers, but you have to atleast hit one of the two.
One other issue from the Bloomberg momentary....
> A very key number here is revenue per user. Snap's results today are indicating average revenue per user at 90 cents. This is down from $1.05 (14%) from what it reported for Q4 2016, before its IPO.
To be completely fair, SNAP management wanted full control to build for the long term and Facebook was down 12% after their first earnings report and Twitter was down 24% so it might just be that its painful for rookie CEOs to manage a public company.
Too bad for employees that this comes before the lock up period ends.
EDIT
Just on the earnings call, they said they don't break out Spectical's numbers but the revenue it generated was about $8 Million.
I'm disappointed by anemic growth: Facebook has 18 percent increase year over year. They have ~2B users [1]
This q Snapchat had growth of ~5% which will be about ~20% per year. But they are 10x smaller than Facebook.
[1] Facebook 5/3/17 earning report
How much social media activity/growth is not human?
As much as I agree with you, that kind of activity especially by first party or those related is called market manipulation. SEC and investors won't take lightly to it.
On a related note, the market itself is controlled by HFT bots. Don't rock the boat too much and no one is the wiser.
Edit: Would love to some actual debate on this rather than downvotes with no context. I have deployed many bots for fun to twitter and reddit. I could easily do the same on Instagram, Snap or Facebook. I could even make them look "Kinda real" with markov chain driven text input. Super, duper easy.
Your blithe comment has some merit on its surface -- I also "think" it seems trivial to do account fraud at a large scale -- but it pattern matches against the "I can build Stack Overflow in a weekend" mode. I can only guess, but I imagine the difficulty factor going from 500 to 1 million bots is much greater than 200x higher. (As in, if there are 1,000,000 people right now on Earth who could do the former, I suspect there are way fewer than 1mm/500 for the latter.)
There are undoubtedly bot networks that operate (although we have no idea for how long), at a scale that would likely surprise me. However, even that doesn't make the data useless (especially when frequently cited against a previous measurement).
Finally, your non-sequitur about markets being controlled by HFT bots hit a number of negative heuristics in my brain.
That's nearly 2/3 of people on the planet with Internet connections, according to estimates by the ITU (approx 3B internet users by the end of 2016) [0]. Even if I believed that user figure, which I dont, there is no way Facebook can grow at the same rate for much longer.
[0] http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFa...
It really does have that many users. Even if a solid 20% of them are all fake accounts (which I don't think the percentage is that high), it's still a large part of the connected world.
There's a reason Facebook is developing technology to bring the rest of the unconnected world online. It's because they know they'll reach a point where they'll have the whole connected market, and the only way forward is to grow the market to it's full potential.
Don't let your hatred of the product or company blind your understanding of its scale and influence on the world (both positive and negative).
The Yellow pages had a similar story not too long ago...
I'll give you one data point. When I was in college, we had a Facebook group for every single class and they were extremely valuable. We also used Facebook events heavily for various on-campus events. This too was extremely valuable. Now that I'm out of college, I have less affinity with those products from Facebook but I gravitate towards different parts of the site now.
Either way, you can say that your life would not materially change for the better or worse if Facebook fell off the face of the internet tomorrow. That's a valid opinion to hold. But don't make the folly of generalizing a global product that is so incredibly pervasive in ways that we can't fully understand. I'm not saying that this reality is a good thing, nor am I saying it's a bad thing. However we can have better conversations about the effect Facebook has than "Facebook is useless", "Zuck is a spy", "I deleted my account, fuck FB", "All their metrics are fake", "Something something Myspace".
Those simply aren't interesting statements anymore. They just aren't. They're tired and have been repeated year after year for more than a decade.
In fact this is how I think of them and their business interests; they are nothing more than merchants of human attention (like Google). After all, the bulk of their revenues comes directly from ads.
VR may be toy-like tech for a lot of people today, but Zuckerberg is betting on it to be the next big frontier for computing similar to how they doubled-down on mobile with the emergence of touch screens heralded by the iPhone.
I've done some pretty substantial traveling throughout Asia, and just about everyone with a smartphone that I've met also has a Facebook account (excluding China).
In Myanmar (aka Burma) the strict military government restricted internet usage until they turned over control of the government last year. Most people are (within the last 12-24 months) using the internet for the first time! Most have never used a computer, and they only know the internet from an (Android) smartphone. However, every single person who I talked to there who had a smartphone had a Facebook.
The one local I talked to most in depth about this had never used Google! He said he didn't know how to use Google, and he didn't think he needed it. I explained what Google can help with: searching for information, reading news, etc. He showed me that he read news and did searches for things all from within the Facebook app.
I saw similar usage of Facebook in other developing Asian countries (Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia), where people used Facebook as a kind of substitute for a web browser / search engine.
You and I would never think to use Facebook as our internet portal, but it seems to be a very sticky and powerful tool for many of those just coming online.
In my opinion, opportunity is better than equality.
FB does not categorically improve the quality of life for its users. FB provides connectivity to others... this is good. But if the cost is making you think the world is askew from what it really is because all you see is what FB's feed shows you... well that's a steep price that nobody, even the poor, should be asked to pay.
This is the most frightening thing I've read in a while.
Now, I am not saying google is the perfect answer, but I consider it a hell of a lot better than facebook.
Maybe that's what it is. "Quality content" and "Facebook" in the same sentence sounds absurd.
Google also linking to the web after ads or their own stuff is a benefit over FB of course. But I don't see that being Google's focus.
The cesspool of fake news, Trump gossip, etc, turning into hot topics amongst Myanmar's budding online culture is sad, like a virus spreading.
Another worrisome side effect is the quick adoption of the medium by hate groups inciting violence towards religious minorities with outright lies compounded by the fact that most Myanmar users don't yet know fact checking is possible thanks to the walled garden.
Some users have landed in jail for not realizing posts containing jests about government officials were viewable by said authorities. The country's speech laws are still evolving and users struggle to understand brand new ceoncepts like scoping of comments.
Interesting times...
[1]. https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-tru...
Instagram Stories alone already outpaces Snap 200M to 166M. Looks like an uphill battle from here.
http://www.thefader.com/2017/04/14/instagram-stories-more-po...
From a consumer perspective, it's disappointing that Facebook controls itself and now this arena. It's gonna be hard to find innovation when purchasing and cloning are the way to do business.
In some circles, having an Instagram is as expected as having Facebook, which makes abstaining difficult.
Snap used to have an advantage in terms of age group. I'm curious if this is still the case.
Anecdotally I've heard from my partner that Instagram effectively duplicated a core feature of Snapchat to the point she no longer sees the point of Snapchat. But she always saw Snapchat as a side novelty, largely because she used Instagram well before Snapchat.
But I also see this as an age group thing, Snapchat had the image of being popular with high school kids while Instagram had penetrated the university-30yr old category most effectively. So it's hard to say merely as an outside spectator. As well as being geographically limited in my perspective.
Welcome to Microsoft circa 1990. People forget how much oxygen Microsoft could suck out of a space simply by mentioning they were going to develop something.
This is a very scary situation, where patents were originally developed to prevent exactly this.
As so many like to say: they idea matters less than the speed and strength of execution. It's clear that the network effects of Facebook makes it very difficult to compete, but is the problem really that they are copying features from other products, or is that just the symptoms of a bigger issue?
Facebook effectively has a monopoly on the digital social network, no matter how many millennials say it's "not cool anymore" – they're still on it.
My personal hypothesis is that this is because we lack a decentralized identity feature on the internet. For better or worse, Facebook and Google solved that problem, and now everything you do is connected to either your Facebook account or gmail. It doesn't matter if you don't have those accounts, becasue everyone else does, more or less, and they're locked in. You can't bring your identity with you. Sure you can close your account and possibly download your data, but if you do that you sever the connections, which is the true valuable bit of the network – the nodes less so.
I really don't like the sheer dominance of Google and Facebook, but I have no idea how to get away from it either. Makes me small just thinking about it.
Unseating Facebook is a very different play from merely innovating.
I wonder what the number would be if those who only watched stories were excluded. Its also worth considering that Instagram delivers some of their announcements as stories and whether or not people viewing those also count towards the active user number.
edit: I'm curious if this is true only for my friend groups/demographic/principal component, poll here: http://www.strawpoll.me/12939274
It might make for a better user experience but that's not good for a free service
I'd argue though the only thing keeping them in the game is network effects and fighting that fight vs IG is... going to be challenging.
It's a very tiny percentage so far - maybe 1-2% of my contacts list - but it is being used.
If this gets to about 10%, Snapchat should be worried. Whatsapp has a massive user base in developing countries.
In the temporary image space, virtually all of the innovation has come from that company, whether it's the initial concept, expanding scope with stories, adding visual effects, etc.
In the end, it might not matter. Facebook repeatedly cloned Snapchat's features, starting with the Poke app in 2012 that Zuck reportedly wrote code for himself.
The result? They jammed it into all of their products (Insta, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.) and seem to be riding the network effect to success.
Not saying that smaller players can't win, but man, brute force and a big network were really effective this time.
Facebook has shown an impressive flexibility and willingness to pay the costs of making big changes when they need to, e.g., acquiring WhatsApp or shifting their product toward Stories. Still, a startup go a really long way by building a product that carries "not Facebook" as a key value proposition.
I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else absolutely hates this new stories thing Facebook is pinching from Snapchat.
Every damn time I pull down (Messenger on iOS) to reload the conversation list I end up at the damn camera. That's not how literally every other app works.
Now Facebook (iOS app) has updated and it feels like whenever I accidentally drag my thumb slightly in a non-specific direction across the screen the damn camera opens there too.
Bring on the next social network. This one's getting all gross and gooey.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/facebook-average-revenue-per-...
I disagree a little with Bloomberg here, the numbers are bad (active users isn't great), but given the same number of users you'd expect advertising revenue (which is what they're driven by) to be down Q1 vs Q4. Ad budgets and spending is cyclical and seasonal, far more money is thrown at the wall during the holiday period than after.
Not trying to come across as snarky, but trying to setup an easy analogy :).
When are we going to say; What the hell is the point of this? Users "using" something doesn't make it profitable unless they are willing to pay you for it. Furthermore, advertising IS NOT working. Look at retail, malls AND name brands... Horrible performance for the bulk of recent memory.
The fact that they have you and your daughter engaging with the product at all is a meaningful thing for the business. There's a lot they can do with even this cursory engagement over time.
I am not a Snap user period. To count my daughter as a user is just plain sad from an investment point of view. She is not going to have a job for 9 years minimum. That means I control the purse strings.
Sanp is like those games that have a gajillion users and then simply die as no one plays them anymore.
(And the fact that there was a monetary transaction for the paper is not unlike going through the pains of downloading and installing an app on your phone.)
That means roughly this:
* It's a funnel (one that is heavily tracked)
* They know how often and how deep users' engagement patterns are and how they shift over time, over different feature launches, and over the age of their users among other parameters.
* They know what it takes to get a lightly engaging user to become one that is more deeply engaging and they know the rate at which this conversion happens.
* They have cohorts of users and they know what types of users move which way through the funnel and how fast.
* Using all this data, they have at their disposal different levers to pull (growth, marketing, product) to move the numbers in the right direction.
Again, all of this doesn't mean that Snapchat will be successful in converting you or your daughter into a heavy Snapchat user today or even tomorrow. But you're painting too simple of a picture using a single high level metric and logical simplification of a process that's very complicated.
The biggest point I want to make here is that NO TWO USERS ARE THE SAME. So to use a high level metric that conflates different types of users by definition and then making an implication about the health of a company using this specific metric's weakness is just silly. There is data that you don't have access to and you're not recognizing that.
I'm guessing the big issue here is their losses doubled while only a small % of active users increased.
Just a guess tho.
My parents, older relatives...everyone I know is on Facebook or Whatsapp.
But they will never use Snapchat.
Snapchat's users are only going to be younger. This makes them an attractive investment 10 years down the line, but not right now.
Snap's shtick is that it's not Facebook, that your parents aren't on it, that your creepy uncle's friend who came to the bbq last 4th of July is NOT there and that Snap is not going to geo-recommend you add him as a friend...that's the point and the main reason it got so popular so quick.
How you monetize that? Dunno, but it will sure make your app popular.
Things like ebitda have a pretty standard audit procedure, there are bank statements and receipts that an auditor can check, and they can investigate variances.
DAU doesn't seem to have a precise definition, and how do we know the method for collecting this metric is accurate? I've personally stuffed up this kind of collection before, and once you do it's very hard to backfill.
Likewise Facebook has had several prominent advertising metric failures, how can we trust their DAU number?
At the end of the day it's just something that the board have defined and decided to use, and if they mess up the collection then it's embarrassing for them, they lose credibility, and investors will sell or install a new board.
Even for things that have (more) precise definitions like profit or earnings, how does one know that the numbers are not deliberately or accidentally incorrect? You just have to trust the board, accountants, and auditors to do their job, and if you don't you shouldn't own the stock.
But the other social sharing platforms then become escape hatches for the cool kids to hang out and share stuff in more authentic/novel/exclusive communities, fueling a few to rocket growth and unicorn valuations. But like that indie band you discovered that's now playing on the radio every damn day, the bigger it gets the more the early adopters will move on to something else. And especially in a situation where your primary market is teenagers, there's nothing less cool than what was cool 5 years ago.
They said their revenue per DAU is $.90 and their server costs per DAU were $.60...so that means server costs were around $100mn while total COGS were $160 mn. So what was that other $60 mn spent on? Admins? But I thought they used the Google App Engine infrastructure to avoid any server admins and such.
Their revenues are exploding with their revenue up nearly 400% from last year, but were below estimates as was user growth which are probably causing the current stock price drop.
They apparently have 2,360 employees doing who knows what (not growing the user base).
My favorite part:
"Spiegel laughed out loud when asked if he was worried about Facebook copying his features. “Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn’t mean they’re Google.""
We'll check back in a year to see if he feels the same way.
snapchat rejects 3bn buyout... yahoo rejects 45bn buyout. how far can it go?
That's like paying $234/month in hosting alone for 1K daily actives. What is all that computing power used for?
2360 if you're Snapchat!
I don't understand what all these people do all day. Same with Twitter, they have 3860 employees according to their website. It seems like 10X as many as needed. I've worked in a few offices with less than 100 employees total, and while I have no idea what it takes to run a service with that much traffic, Snapchat runs on Google's cloud service.
> “Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn’t mean they’re Google.""
Maybe it will be a classic in the same genre as Ballmers answer to what he thought about Apple's new product the iPhone.
Unfortunately B2B sales is still very much people driven. Lots of calls, emails, meetings x 10 until you close.
That's interesting. I was curious how their choice to use Google App Engine would work out. It's reputation is easy to start with but expensive to run and some other issues. https://www.recode.net/2017/3/1/14661126/snap-snapchat-ipo-s...
I wonder if they would have done better with a stack like WhatsApp - Erlang running on their own servers. Or even switching over to that in the future. I think WhatsApp at 500m users had about 35 engineers and 550 servers and so costs maybe 10% of Snap's. http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...
It's funny, a lot of people think you exit AWS/GCE to rack your own machines, but I was on a datacenter tour in SV a few years back and was reminded that having fine-grained control of your network is just as a big a reason to do it. Adtech/finance do this all the time to control latency, I imagine it's also a consideration for Snap.
I wonder if they'll ever build a CDN. It's probably not the right traffic pattern without a lot of re-sharing, but still, I could see it.
You have to admire facebook. They've been focused on low-resource Android for a long time, even requesting employees to use slower connections from time to time to make them viscerally feel the effect of low-bandwidth Internet. fb really gets that they need an Asia growth story and they've done pretty well. I simply don't see how Snap will do anything comparable given that their entire service is predicated on high-bandwidth video shot from high-end smartphones even half the US probably can't afford.
Q4'15 - 13.8%
Q1'16 - 14%
Q2'16 - 17.2%
Q3'16 - 7%
Q4'16 - 3.2%
Instagram Stories launched Q3'16. Going forward, growth is going to be flat, maybe even negative, now that every messenger service now has their own Stories clone.
Going to be very interesting to see how they handle user growth & user engagement.
1) Teenage users, their bread and butter, are leaking out to Instagram
2) Older users, their growth market, are being "stolen" by the various messaging apps that they're already on (plus Instagram)
So now they have to simultaneously fend off Instagram draining their primary userbase, while also competing with all the popular messenger apps cloning their main product feature.
The latter is going to be just as difficult as the former. Overseas, WhatsApp (Europe), and WeChat and Line (Asia) are going to seize whatever int'l growth they were hoping to grab. In the US, chances are that if Stories catches-on with the older crowd, it'll be through either Instagram or the various messenger apps they're already on.
During the IPO roadshow, SNAP was trying to position itself as a media/entertainment company, but media companies will follow the audience, and it's hard to see them sticking it out with SNAP if viewership numbers falter.
Hard to see how they claw their way out of this. The comparisons to FB are poor IMO because they at least strong MAU growth going for it and no real viable competitors with an alternative product. Even the comparisons to Twitter are flawed. The doubly whammy of decline growth + decline revenue per user is creating the perfect storm for SNAP.
This is my thinking as well. Stories was a good idea but there wasn't anything proprietary about it and now that a larger service (Instagram) copied it much better there isn't much point to using it on Snapchat anymore. I would imagine their users will continue using their silly filters and doing direct messaging but so many apps have built in filters now I don't know that it is a big enough differentiator anymore.
I think the performance of their stock is going to depend on how well they execute on a new product like spectacles.
I personally don't see how it keeps going in the face of Instagram, though their filters are pretty cool. Instagram could copy that too of course, but it wouldn't have the same whimsy that Snapchat brings to the feature.
As a former professional investor quarterly is fine. i want mgmt focused on running the business, not reporting to investors. Anyone who wants more frequent data so they can trade the stock can hit the road as far as I care.
Do you think that having some data reported automatically in realtime could minimize surprises such as what we see here? Perhaps then the quarterly reports could be more focused on describing the longterm strategy and market landscape?
Go read Buffetts annual shareholder letters, they are free on the internet going back 40 years. He repeatedly makes the key point that your investments need to have some enduring competitive advantage, if they do you don't need constant upgrades, if they don't sell. Enduring competitive advantages don't disappear over night, if they degrade they do it slowly over many years.
I think that with new companies, like Snapchat, Instagram, or even Uber, changing strategies on a monthly basis has become somewhat of a requirement.
But in reality it's not totally true. SnapChat and (probably) Instagram have huge installed bases, but haven't yet figured out how to monetize them. They aren't businesses or investments, they have no strategy other than just pure speculation.
But Uber provides a service connecting riders with drivers that costs pennies per ride to deliver and earns dollars per ride in revenues. If you know how much Uber is spending to build out markets, and on unneeded distractions like UberEats and self driving cars, you can estimate the value of their core business. Uber's strategy has never changed, they've just obfuscated it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_10-Q
Edit: This is only relevant to publicly traded companies.
In working with public company CFO's, I would guess 50% of the time & effort that goes into quarterly reporting is making sure everything came out of the SAP system correctly.
Snapchat -- which, after dropping 23% today has a market cap of 21.5B.
Or ALL of...
Yelp - 2.21B
GoPro - 1.21B
FitBit - 1.38B
Groupon - 2.01B
Twitter - 13.59B
Sonic - 1.27B
...for a total of 21.67B
Don't buy.
I will definitely buy some SNAP after they employees sell like crazy in desperation. I am optimistic about future value of SNAP and pessimistic about Facebook
If just punting out and buying a few units, yea why not.
But if you are working towards building a reliable portfolio, I would recommend spreading/indexing your monies.
And Snap is something I would personally not touch, maybe not even with an index, not just yet.
This reads like they gave out $2 BILLION in RSU's that vested if the company went public. That is a pretty sweet payday.
EDIT: It is a sweet payday unless you can't sell the stock to pay the taxes owed right away. Then if SNAP tanks you have a HUGE tax bill and no way to pay it.
Guess you can't fool all people all the time.
Definitely not that one. The Spectacles store on the Venice Beach boardwalk is always a desolate wasteland.
It was actually kind of disconcerting. For anyone not familiar with the Venice boardwalk, it is jam packed with stores selling overpriced food/drinks and kitschy tourist stuff. Most of the stores are small, packed with merchandise, and overflowing with people. The Spectacles store is probably one of the larger ones square footage wise, and has very prominent frontage. I've been in the area a few times over the last month and it has always been either completely empty, or almost completely empty.
How are you going to wear sunglasses (unless of course you are on a beach) to any indoor or late night event/outing without looking like total douchebag??
The downside is you can't really get the video up on youtube or somewhere where it can easily be shared with anyone other than your Snapchat friends. But whatever, there's probably a half dozen Shenzen startups cobbling together open source Spectacles knockoffs as we speak.
Except it looks like they're built like dollar store glasses, and have terrible battery life
Hey, cool.
Good thing you're paying Google and Amazon about $200 million a year while your user growth plateaus!
And yet, it seems that the past 5 years of economic activity have been illusory. I expect a similar fate of Uber and Airbnb. Once the dust settles only the staid big co's shall remain.
It's not difficult to know how that particular story is going to end.
I've basically stopped using AirBnB entirely unless there is a 2x difference in price between a comparable hotel.
AirBnB is suffering the same product issues as Uber. Most of the listings now are from professional hosts with multiple properties. This is especially true in "hot" cities. As a result, quality of rentals have really declined from a few years ago, and anecdotally, the prices have also gone up - with all the various fees, it's really not that much cheaper than a hotel. And worse than a hotel, you have little to no recourse when something goes sideways.
I personally don't want to have an identity on the web. If that's against the rules could you kindly point it out to me? That's definitely something I'd be interested in learning about.
It's not in the guidelines yet but it will make it in there eventually. In the meantime, it's against the rules in the sense that we don't allow it, and ban accounts that do it, for the reason I explained above.
Petro China, Exxon, GE, China Mobile, Industrian and Commercial Bank of China
Top 5 companies by market cap in 2017:
Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Berkshire
That's a hell of an illusion
But, as far as I can tell the software industry has contracted into those big 5 tech firms. The siren call of working at a startup and making it is sounding strident.
Knowing what you know now, what startup, if any, would you have joined 5 years ago?
Would you join any startup now?
If you look at my comment history you'll see I've been saying this for a while and I think it'll only get more true with further industry consolidation, which will make it both harder to displace incumbents product-wise, and harder to compete with them salary-wise.
Disclosure: Not a user or stock holder of SNAP
What makes Facebook so threatening to Snapchat is the aggressive cloning in tandem with it's pre-existing, larger network.
By the time Google decided to clone Facebook, the Facebook Graph was already more powerful than the GMail graph (which is what Google Plus was built on).
I said "great job".
> Plus, by comparison, had upwards of 1,000 [people on staff], sucked up from divisions across the company.
This report shows Snapchat missing on that mark too.
FB grew at a faster rate than SNAP from a much bigger base.
This figure represents pure lunacy in the infrastructure department. Nobody leading this team cares about cost.
They've got to turn the ship around. With user growth rather anemic they're not going to easily "grow" their way to profitability. They need to sort the fundamentals of the company to get the costs in check.
Problem is even if they had 50% margin today they'd be valued at a very rich valuation. Long story short there's not much in the fundamentals other than pure hype holding up the value of the stock at this point.
DAUs increased 5% quarter-over-quarter.
$2B in employee stock compensation.
Net loss of $2.2B in this quarter alone....
This looks really bad.
General and administrative
Q1 2017: 1,174,476
Q1 2016: 24,011
Seems wildly over valued to me still. Compare to yelp even at a market cap of ~2b vs this 21b mkt cap behemoth. Yeah, time to short some Snap.
For SNAP it's especially bad considering that the common shares are non-voting if I recall.
I should have joined Snap.
Edit: Nevermind. I replied to the wrong comment.
ah ok...just saw that. dollars in thousands. that's slightly better but not really. my rating for this stock remains 'dodo'.
Please pick a side.
Many tech companies are posting growth inline with guidance and performing quite well. Many publicly listed companies are performing quite well in terms of projections. Condemning an entire sector because a single company shit the bed in their first earnings call is a bit much.
Consider that even after this huge drop they are still at their IPO price. Not that I'm a buyer of this company (I don't understand them - doesn't mean they are bad but just that I don't understand them enough to invest directly in them) but it isn't a disaster.
I've seen bubbles burst. You'll know it. This isn't it. This is a correction.
This has got to be the laziest trope that gets brought out every time a tech company loses some money.
I know it's not the main reason for the -23% in premarket, but it show a certain culture and disdain for shareholders, in my opinion.
But Facebook takes user experience very seriously (hence why it is so huge), and even though Facebook does so many more things than Snapchat, it's easy to use.
My retirement-age Mom uses Facebook just about daily. I'm an older millennial (who builds software UIs), and I find Snapchat baffling to use. It's such a bad UX that I can't bring myself to want to use it.
Facebook is crushing Snapchat because it's more than just features that keep users coming back on a daily basis.
I'm saying that in my professional opinion, Snapchat's user experience is not good. And if you guys want to start a Go Fund Me over this, I'll bring in real users and run tests on it. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my working hypothesis.
If someone may age is already out of the core demo, how did Snap have that valuation? Teens and college kids are just not that valuable of a market.