As skeptical as I am that Snap will ever be a moneymaker, this data point is not meaningful in any way. Facebook traded below (often _well_ below) its IPO price for the first 15 months on the market.
I guess the meaningfulness of this data point is that people are dubious that SNAP will succeed long term. But that's somewhat tautological: if people thought SNAP would succeed, they'd buy it.
The question is whether Snapchat is fundamentally flawed or a few features away from becoming a strong company.
It just seems to me that they have too much competition against Facebook...a behemoth that's still innovating.
If some company came out with a cool twist on search after Google, I'd be bearish on them as well.
Used to see a random one-off Whatsapp story. Now I see 2-3 stories every day.
Instagram stories are much more popular. See anywhere from 5-20 stories from friends as well as brands.
Point is, people who use these stories will never shift to Snapchat now. Even if it doesn't grow Facebook's audience, these features will plug the leaks
This doesn't matter too much, but it also feels like Snapchat has more competition in a way too while growing. Besides other social networks and FB copying them, Snow is gaining ground in Asia right now. FB primarily had regional competitors limited to one main country (like VK or Orkut in Brazil). I could be wrong about this though.
Personally, I never post anything on Instagram Stories, but I do view them because they are there. I have my Instagram feed curated for my Instagram audience (which is very public and intended for things that aren't private), and Snapchat for my Snapchat audience (which is private and intended for only friends and family). I know many others do the same.
I just think they’re different worlds, with diff goals. Snap is more about your honest moment / communication thru pics where as IG is your idealized life.
Like IG Stories, Google Plus had crazy fast growth at first, they hit almost 30 million users in the first month which was insane for that time and even today. They also had a very diverse audience. But, just like Instagram Stories, those numbers were only so high because most of their users were "users" because they were already partly on the platform through Gmail, like most IG Stories users were already IG users.
Look, I'm not saying IG Stories isn't a real competitor, but saying that Facebook didn't have competition during their IPO like Snapchat does is not true. Many people were predicting that Google Plus could kill Facebook. Read some articles from that time period, there was a lot of talk about that.
There's articles to this day spelling the doom and gloom of Tesla. Just like there have been many for the past decade. It has always been one of the most shorted stocks. This isn't directly analogous, but just because a large amount of people believe this doesn't mean there aren't also a large amount of people who don't. Aka these people won't have hindsight bias either.
Many people also did not think Google+ was ever a threat, myself included. Google+ was always the butt of jokes with my friends with their inflated user numbers. So there isn't any hindsight bias from me or my friends or many discussions and articles I read during the time that didn't take G+ seriously.
IG stories isn't identical to Snap stories yet. IG is starting to think about allowing you to limit who you post content to. I assume this will be done with nice UX. Then the direct comparison of Snap and IG stories can be made. For now, IG stories main ground it has taken from Snap is unlikely to go back to Snap. People or companies with bigger audiences. IG makes more sense as a place to post your stories for these users.
It's likely that IG stories ratio of users who only consume stories is much greater than Snap. And the avg IG story has many more viewers. But Snapchat likely has many more stories posted.
Sure, looking back now it's easy to say Google Plus was a failure, but at the time people were really excited about it. Check out this graph of their growth:
And again, the reason for my post is that I wanted to point out there were people worried about competitors taking away market share from Facebook during their IPO just like there are people worried about competitors to Snapchat. It's only now that it's easy to discount those competitors because we see how it played out, at the time people were really excited about it, check out this graph: http://i.imgur.com/yQU2Y2z.jpg
IG has grown around 45% in the past year. Snapchat has grown half that, close to 23%. IG is the more established social network and growing faster. That's the worry. Sheer numbers make it look so much worse. Snapchat added around 50M new MAUs over the past year. IG did over 4x that at over 200M.
I remember seeing charts similar to the one you posted and dismissing it as BS back then too. As did others. It's a vanity metric. Without knowing the engagement, it is mostly meaningless. And most signs pointed to there being weak actual engagement. Especially if you look past those user's first one or two enhancements of G+. Most prob never engaged again. The same can't be said for the others. FB's first 50M users were by and large engaged. All the others were too, to different degrees. All far above Google+'s.
Google Reader and YouTube both predate G+, and were specialized social networks. One for links of any kind (you could share anything), and the other for videos.
The actual engagement rate was always weak (I'm defining it as purposefully reading or posting to google+).
Within a couple months, it was essentially nothing. I don't think Google+ ever sniffed 100M monthly active users after the initial two months of going completely public and having the hype. I'd think if it was 9 figures in active uses for the first few months, it was because a majority of people tried it once or twice or just did the Google+ profile creation. This is big because it means Google+ was never a real competitor in terms of popularity.
Google+ never felt like a threat at all to FB. And within a few months of public availablity, didn't seem like a threat of being a prominent social network behind FB either.
--
IG is around 725M monthly active users now. I think their DAU is roughly 450M. A year ago, they were at around 500M MAU.
Snapchat is at 170M DAU. It was at 145M DAU in August 2016. It is now at roughly 330 MAU and 290 MAU in August 2016 (I know they were at ~300 MAU in November 2016).
IG is outpacing Snapchat by percentage of growth on top of sheer numbers while being far far larger, of course benefitting from being around longer. Snapchat has always been the underdog to Instagram.
There's no comparison of Google+ to FB in 2012 and Instagram to Snapchat in 2017 or any of the last few years. With IG always having been larger than Snap and recent user growth of IG massively outperforming Snap too -- "users will go back to to their previous habits" doesn't fit here or in Google+'a case.
There are likely few people who switched from Snapchat to just IG in recent months while treating it like Snapchat (mostly DMing and doing stories) outside of bigger online names using IG stories. There's nothing to reverse of going back to old habits. Meanwhile with Google+, it never even became a habit. Most people never really used it. It was a one or two off thing for the vast majority of users, mostly perpetrated by the pushing of existing users to try Google+.
If your point was about people going back to Snapchat stories over IG stories, I'm not so sure. Just like you, friends still mostly post to Snap stories. IG for me is like 10% of friends or acquaintances posting regular stories. But a ton of people popular accounts posting. I don't see this changing. So IG stories will also always be bigger than Snapchat if current trends stick.
Has Google Plus at any point ever had as much as 2 percent of FB's active users? If not, what metric do you use to consider it a "very real competitor" at some point in time?
Snap is a much bigger question mark. So far their plan looks to be "Do what Facebook did, only for AR/VR". Except Facebook and Snap will be splitting the market; where Facebook had no competition and absolute dominance before they IPOed. Facebook is obviously playing to win on Snap's home turf. Even if Snap is successful, Facebook will make it very expensive for them.
I'd argue Snapchat delivered one of the first mainstream AR 'hits' - many of my friends can't get enough of their AR photo filters. To be fair, many of them are extremely impressive tech demos, fluidly augmenting the user's face in real time video. Whether that's a meaningful strategic advantage is another question!
Facebook is already a top aggregator -- and already has a lot of preference data from billions of users. Those are enormous network effects, and even if Snap is hugely innovative, Facebook will always be able to replicate Snap's products much faster and better than Snap will be able to replicate Facebook's network effects.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-goo...