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Comment by KaoruAoiShiho | Hacker News Reader

I just went long on snap after saying for years it's a shitty facebook and if you like social media or online ads then you should just invest in facebook. The latest conference call was very enlightening in that it showed me how much snapchat was doing wrong and what they can do to fix it. I think there's a real opportunity here. It's one thing if snap just can't outcompete facebook, and a whole other thing if the problem is simply snap's simple and easily fixable mistakes. I believe it's the latter and I think snap will at least 2x in 2 years.

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I wish you well on your speculation.

I didn't dig into the financials all that much, or even listen to call so I'm approaching this from a place of ignorance, but I do happen to have five or six family members between the ages of 13 and 18 and all of them have unanimously reported to me that Snapchat is unequivocally over.

That's as anecdotal as it gets, but I'm also hard pressed to believe that they're all simultaneously unique. And as we've seen elsewhere in tech, once the "cool" vibe is gone (Yahoo, AOL, etc.), it's a long spiral to irrelevance.

I can't count the number of times I've heard from people very plugged into the industry declare that the FB exodus was underway.

If you read Hacker News and Reddit, it's obvious that Facebook is about to die. People are put off by its privacy issues, its outlandishly aggressive efforts to keep you clicking, and its culpability in tilting information and elections to shady actors.

But I'd probably make a bet than they'll reach 3bn before long.

3bn what? I still "use" it in some sense, but I mostly publish auto-syndicated stuff, and read via mbasic, which uses no JavaScript and limits their surveillance. Of course I never load their "like" buttons. My parents found it useless and stopped using it; my kids can't be bothered. How much is Myspace 2.0 worth?

The number of people who do all of what you do with FB is a minuscule fraction of people. You're also not counting that Instgram, Whatsapp, and FBM have 800M, 1.4B, and 1.1B monthly active users each. With IG already likely profitable and likely to make billions in profits soon and FBM trying to begin to try to monetize. These three are prob worth at least $125B if spun out or separated hypothetically.

This is a diff world and company than MySpace. Calling it 2.0 is misguided at best.

~$520 billion as of Friday. Aside from international expansion, the difference between Facebook and MySpace is that Facebook has made and will in all likelihood continue to make a lot of money, actual profit measurable with GAAP. Snapchat will die before it makes GAAP $1, just as MySpace did.

3 billion monthly active users. They hit 2 billion this summer [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15880494/facebook-2-billi...

> 3 billion monthly active users.

I was trying to suggest that a lot of those "users" are not sources of income/data. I'll bet a lot of them are either bots, or humans smart enough to use an ad blocker. And most of the MAU humans are probably in a 10-year age range, having signed up when FB was useful.

I would disagree again here. Significant numbers of their users use their apps only/majority of the time. Can't block ads on closed platforms!

Do your family have private or public Insta profiles? My understanding is that the usecase is not perfectly the same. Insta is "halfway" between snap and twitter, though I'm sure Zuck would like it to be "both".

If you don't mind me asking, what social media are your family members using? Are their friends on that platform too?

Instagram is the current leader, with Kik, Snapchat, and Messenger in some messy run-off after.

I have to admit a lot of surprised how quickly Instagram got to parity and overtook Snapchat with my family, but I'm at least two decades out of that demographic so that's probably more of me being old and out of it than anything else!

I'm also very optimistic about Snap - it's one of the only social networks I use regularly.

That said, Snap could fix a lot of things and grow revenue and the stock could still not move - they're at about the same market cap of Twitter with a fraction of the revenue and user growth that is similarly stalling

There seems to be a hard boundary with reaching the demographic of users in developed nations and both Snap and Twitter are there

> There seems to be a hard boundary with reaching the demographic of users in developed nations and both Snap and Twitter are there

I think Twitter and snap are very different. Snap is a messenger app and has the same potential as FB messenger or wechat. Twitter will never be that. The latest news has Tencent making a strategic investment and bringing chinese style monetization to Snapchat. I'm very optimistic about this.

Interesting, what is Chinese style monetization?

I think it’s referring to how a lot of Chinese apps have micro transactions / are essentially payment channels with incentives built in or games built on top.

Games, payment, micro-transactions.

There's a third possibility that you should be cognizant of: Snap runs out of money.

If they have ~3 more quarters like the last one then they're insolvent. There may be a real opportunity here but not enough time to execute on it (especially given that every early employee can walk away now)

In that event they may recapitalize or go private equity. Too big to fail.

> Too big to fail.

I don't think you understand what that means because it doesn't apply to Snap.

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