Snapchat installs fell 16% in April; Instagram continues to pull further ahead | Hacker News Reader

Snapchat installs fell 16% in April; Instagram continues to pull further ahead

venturebeat.com

Snapchat was always evolving the product way too slow for me. It took them forever to liberate the emojis into stickers. The few hit features they nailed won't help them cross over. It could happen that they will continue to lack some core features, that make a social app used widely & frequently. Like how Facebook seamlessly added threaded comments somewhere along the way, while following conversations on Twitter falls under graph theory.

It doesn't help that their application is a buggy mess either - I can't remember the last time I managed to wrangle snapchat into taking a landscape snap.

Snapchat vs Instagram is like Myspace vs Facebook. I find Snapchat completely unusable and even can't figure out concept of it.

That's not what I see when I look at that plain chart

The numbers are there in the second paragraph.

> 21.1 million, compared to 25.2 million

Looks insignificant

Snapchat is currently losing 3 dollars a share per year.

That's about 1/7th of its value (value, not revenue) every year.

Their story is that they'll have such a huge amount of user growth and that they'll figure out some way to monentize that huge amount of users, because that's the easy part, right?

If their growth stalls somewhere before profitability, they're toast. Imagine an auto parts manufacturer posting those sorts of numbers - sales down YoY and no profits. They'd be worth about as much as their office furniture could fetch on the open market.

Considering an install valued at $.26 [1], 4.1 million installs (the difference) is worth a bit over a million dollars, in one month.

Either you make enough to make a million bucks a month insignificant, or you just have little sense of scale.

[1] - https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-benchmark-for-cost-per-ins...

>That puts the actual downloads for the month at 21.1 million, compared to 25.2 million for April 2016, back when the company was riding a user-growth hot streak.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the title is a bit misleading - these numbers are year-over-year, comparing April 2016 to April 2017. So it's not a loss of $1M in one month. It's more that this month last year, they had 4.1M more installs. Judging by the graph, it looks like they only dipped ~1M installs between March and April 2017.

That's not to say that this looks good, but it's not as disastrous as it seems.

It's not misleading, YoY is the standard way to do that comparison which is why it didn't need to be in the headline.

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