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...
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.
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.
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.
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.