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Comment by dpandya | Hacker News Reader

What kind of other models could potentially work for Snapchat other than advertising? I don't see any candidates from the list of other companies that serve young consumers.

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At a not-even-breaking-new-ground level:

1. they could meld the treasure-hunt aspect of Pokemon Go with sponsored hyperlocal recommendations. ARGs (alternate reality games) are popular with Snapchat's core demographic, and if Snap could pitch itself as a platform for ARGs, their advertising woes would disappear.

2. microtransactions familiar from Asian messaging apps: cosmetic stuff like stickers, emoji packs, backgrounds, filters, etc

3. (macro-)transactions for large-scale content inside of Snapchat. Facebook had entire video games playable within it; there is no reason Snapchat can't do this. There is a market for VIP access for 'private' Snapchats of celebrities and creators, but today this is arranged out-of-band, because Snapchat provides no support for this in-app. Patreon was able to make headway in this underserved market.

4. Snapcash could compete with Paypal, but it's vastly overemphasized.

5. Snap Map has so much potential, and it's unexploited. From mundane to exotic, opportunities include location search, sponsored recommendations, user-generated content about real-life places (cf. Yelp), user matching for transactions (cf. Uber), user-generated content anchored in virtual space (AR stuff)...

6. Subscriptions. Either to gate specific content or features, or just for the sake of. Discord has a sponsor tier that gives a few perks but is just as much for the sake of providing support. There is always a subset of users who will pay.

> 1. ...sponsored hyperlocal recommendations.

> 5. ...sponsored recommendations,...

i.e. ads and ads. One of the most depressing aspects of the current tech bubble is how most "entrepreneurs" are not making new things, but finding new ways for others to advertise existing things. If they win the lottery and become billionaires, they start building rockets.

> most "entrepreneurs" are not making new things, but finding new ways for others to advertise existing things

What a bizarrely reductionist lens through which to view Snapchat and I guess consumer apps in general — Snapchat is not it's business model (or lack thereof).

Snapchat clearly made a "new thing". It's just looking to an existing business model to monetize that new thing.

It's not reductionist, it's honest.

I don't see what Snapchat has done that's new. Disappearing messages? When I was a teenager we used to call them "gossip" or even just phone calls.

If the tech industry spent the amount of energy used to glorify petty crap on something more useful we would have been defeated poverty and all diseases a few weeks ago.

Fair enough -- my view may be too reductionist. Still, it would be refreshing to see something based on a business model other than "surveil and/or capture attention, then sell ads."

I would create an extension to the snap ecosystem, which would be called "snap graffiti". Snap graffiti would allow you to attach a geographic location to a picture. These pictures could be anything, and anyone could see the pictures by being near the location. They would only hang on to the location for a certain amount of time. This in and of itself is not a business plan. But I would then allow these pictures to be connected to economic activity. For example, I have a bunch of iron pipes in my garden which could be taken to the waste disposal arena. Any teenager could do this for me just by carying away the metal. I would be able to "snap graffiti" the pile of metal in my garden, and tag it with $5. A bored teen could then knock on my door and carry away the metal. They would get $4.50 and snap-chat would take a small service fee.

For an idea what kind of income you're looking at from such a business. Imagine 4 million of their nearly 200 million users, do a $5 task every day. After credit card fees of 25.05 cents per transaction [1] that would leave 24.95 cents to snapchat for every transaction. That would be around a million dollars a day in income. Not terrible. And on valentines day, they could allow users to exchange a $5 task for a $10 coupon to Olive garden. Olive garden would, presumably give them coupons like that for free. If a million users chose that exchange, that would be an additional $4.5 million in income.

[1] https://bandcamp.com/help/selling#fee

Bored teen cuts finger on metal. Parent sues you and Snapchat.

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