Snap Revenue Surges 72% on User Growth, Advertising Gains
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
There's probably a lot of interesting sponsored content, but if I want to just use it as a chat app it doesn't get in the way. That's the big advantage that Apple has with iMessages, no pressure to make a worse service for users in order to turn a profit. We'll see if Snap can manage to do it without driving their users off to the next one.
What a novel approach to online socializing, said IRC, MSN, AIM, ICQ...
I forget though, that SV and places like Ycom can't resell old tech to investors.
Pets.com taught us you have to just keep cranking out the hits, or they'll get wise to the hollow value really being proposed.
Sadly, it seems to be directly at odds with what companies want, because social networks often start off with having that property and lose it as they need to make the investors happy.
- Facebook -> hasn't been true in a looooong time
- Instagram -> hasn't been true in a few years
- Twitter -> I think it's not true anymore? Might be if you click the right options in your settings, but who knows for how long
An annoying thing about Twitter that I experienced recently is I started getting notifications for "top Tweets." I had to tell Twitter multiple times that I didn't want them before they stopped (there was no option to put an immediate stop to them).
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/technology/personaltech/p...
Importance = function (frequency of me retweeting or liking this person's tweets, duration of follow)
What I would really want for Instagram to allow me to select certain users to show their posts first. Facebook lets me do this.
> Sadly, it seems to be directly at odds with what companies want
There is a companyless protocol for this exact functionality, RSS.
I don't care what your analytics say about user engagement, they are wrong. Just stop the "relevancy game" and the stupid news feeds everywhere.
While revenue and user growth are both positive signs, there are still plenty of red flags. SNAP's hefty valuation is based on much higher growth rates and a faster route to profitability that still has yet to be seen.
[1] https://investor.snap.com/~/media/Files/S/Snap-IR/reports-an...
Edit: grammar
Most young people I know use Facebook for groups (local like a school or city), events , and chat. IMO Facebook is shooting all of these feet off with the algorithmic newsfeed and spinning off messenger.
Snap however is used constantly to keep up with peers. Haven't met a single person that uses instagram's stories, even though its usage numbers tell another story.
It really might just be my age/location/privlege bubble, but it consistently baffles me that Facebook keeps growing at such a faster speed than snap.
I asked my younger siblings and none of them nor their friends have facebooks, besides the one in college. They all have snap and insta, and spend ~2X time on snap than insta. Most text communication is snap or SMS.
Slack is much better, but Discord sunk its teeth into the gaming community and it spread.
Slack's extra features and integrations are nice, too, but I just don't like Discord because it... doesn't even work as advertised.
Pretty interface, easy to use, voice is pretty low latency (although I miss my mumble server), and it uses ~80mb of ram to sit in like 5 groups, which while not fantastic blows "rather open it in chrome" slack out of the water.
New signal desktop instantly uses 200mb and has to "loading messages" for 3s every single startup :(
On the whole, for a product proudly marketing itself as a Slack replacement, it does a terrible job actually providing the same functionality.
My preference is probably steam chat. The new signal desktop is a dumpster fire.
Most people in my age group simply don't spend very much time in front of a computer. Their phone is their portal to the internet and has generally everything they're looking for.
I'm not familiar with this, and the most prevalent Snapchat users among my friends are Android users.
Tencent bought 12% of Snap in Nov of 2017. Likely that has, and will continue to push emerging market efforts by Snap.
Talked to a friend yesterday who said that he forgot Snapchat even existed, and was installed on his phone, because he hadn't received a snap in a year.
Also, my younger siblings both use Snapchat and Messenger consistently, and are avid users of Facebook (because of meme tagging primarily).
On memes, I think for me and most of my friends something like 90% of facebook use is meme pages.
I think people that use facebook as a meme platform will move to different platforms when something offers pseudonymity with consistent user blocking (ie pseudonym that must be linked to a phone#) and solid group/forum posting + chat features. I think people are vaguely uncomfortable with putting their real name into "Red Commie Memes For Anti-State Teens" type groups and will want to move to pseudonymous or temporal (snap) platforms when they reach feature parity.
Right now facebook memes are growing fast because it is easy for "normie" facebook users to click a couple memes and get sucked into the vortex.
We have a population of 100 million.
The world is bigger than just the US.
Indonesia, with a population of 260 million, also overwhelmingly prefers Facebook over Snapchat.
Now you're shifting the goalposts.
But now that I think a little more, maybe we're starting to see a shift of say, tobacco + fast-food etc moving into poorer countries to extract $$ from them. So this mobile-game-social-addiction is the next/current step.
Instagram is also a behemoth compared to Snapchat. Same with Whatsapp and FBM.
Instagram and Facebook may have stories but the site is heavily predicated on pride/narcissism arms race with your "friends".
Even your biggest narcissist can only "win" for 24 hours on Snapchat and from what I can see they'll generally tap out of keeping up any facades to try and make others jealous about how (seemingly) great their life is within 4-5 weeks of using it and then join others in appreciating the little things that make life worth living.
Your own personal values and mileage may vary, but they've hit a niche with me.
People are quick to write off Snapchat's popularity with young users as it being the hot new toy they will tire with, but I think it's a lot deeper than that. They see the mistakes of millennials and older with social media and want nothing to do with it (and are thus nowhere to be found on Facebook, yet still on Instagram because it hasn't suffered the same problems yet). Snapchat avoids a lot of those pitfalls, though of course not without other problems. I think so long as that impermanence is the focus, and they allow for easy/simple communication between close friends (I'm worried about the non-chronological part for this exact reason), they will be a big part of the future of social media.
Facebook and the apps it owns have all tried towards that, but if the core is permanence (the classic profile, posts, walls, likes, comments), they will always be fighting a rising tide. Adding stories on top of that doesn't change the core use of the app.
I’d be interested to see data to support this assertion.
Do an experiment though. Look at all your friends around 17-18 (hard if you're older to get a good sample size, but find someone who has friends that age if possible). Now scroll through their walls and see when you hit 2016. I bet it's pretty quick in 75%+ cases.
I just did it on the few I have (siblings of college friends). One took 4 posts to get to 2015. Two of those were blocks of happy birthday posts grouped together. I know all of those people are very active on Instagram though.
Now if you can, look at people ages 23-25 or so. See how much more they post.
This is of course only data you can essentially get from being young and having access to friends in both ranges. But I see it time and time again.
I also put that cutoff at 19 for a reason based on my experience with others. I'm right on the border of millennial and whatever they decide comes after it. Most people my age used Facebook originally and evacuated gradually over the past 3-5 years. If you look at people 19 and under, they are barely to be found at all on Facebook since they would be aged 16-14 at the time of that evacuation, and thus have no need to evacuate if they never had an account they used in a significant manner.
I have a hard time believing that people under 18 are making a conscious decision on this, especially the 'see the mistakes of milennials' part. They're only concerned with themselves an their status in their group, just like millenials were, but on a different platform.
My early teen sister, for example, uses Instagram and Snapchat for two reasons: all het friends use it, my mom doesn't want her to use Facebook because it has a bad rep. The fact that Instagram is owned by Facebook is something that most people, outside of the well informed, are unaware of.
Their moms (say 26-36yo range here) are on facebook, post pictures of them, and like their posts. It's never going to be the youth platform as long as everything said is said in front of your mom, dad, grandma, and racist uncle.
Young people -desperately- want to take selfies that won't get dredged up 3 years later, and have been hearing about horror stories about people posting pictures of illicit or just immature activities since myspace. A kid who has been aware of their whole life is about <20yo.
Snap advertisers are mostly lifestyle brands that want to engage with their users in a new way. Tacobell isn't advertising on Snap, but Popular Mechanics is. When a user clicks on Popular Mechanics they have confidence it's because a user wants to engage with them, and Popular Mechanics hopes this closer relationship has benefits outside of the Snapchat app. A user choosing to give you their attention is a _very_ valuable thing. Most other social media advertisements are missing this part.
[1] https://www.marketingdive.com/news/taco-bells-cinco-de-mayo-...
I should not have used that example.
Think outside the bun for a change.
My guess is it's just another way of saying people like consuming media from companies that are relevant to their interests.
I personally find Snap's advertising to be nice. It's nice to have it separate from what my friends upload like what others have said. I've also found that what Snap puts out is way more enjoyable to look at than Facebook's advertisements.
Take sports for example. I'm a huge NFL, NBA, and MLB fan. Facebook's sports-oriented ads are usually limited to the game score which I don't need to look at because the game is already on my TV. Snap, on the other hand, puts up a nice collection of Snapchat videos from other people. I can get a pre-game locker room video from the players and I can get a fan's view of the game-winning touchdown in the same collection. Both are things you wouldn't see on a typical game broadcast. I'm fully aware that both are advertisements, but one is significantly more relevant and more enjoyable for me to consume than the other.
Lifestyle brands are a type of business as varied as Wired Magazine to Rayban Sunglasses. They aren't selling a product, but a "lifestyle" or a feeling. Some people legitimately feel differently when drinking Pepsi verses Coca-Cola.
If you see a popular guy wearing Gucci it can increase the value you give that brand. Gucci has a markup because of this "lifestyle" effect.
Edit: Lifestyle brand literally has a Wikipedia article on it, if you want to know more.
Telling "Apple" that you despise them for batterygate. Or tell them how much you really like the new touchbar. Stuff like that is "engage" with "brands."
I'm not a Snap user, so I'm not really sure what I would do. Send them a snap of my middle finger?
I'm definitely not anyones target demographic, but I do find some satisfaction engaging with Totino's Pizza Rolls.
I like weight lifting as a sport. I once saw a video from a popular fitness band that had a ton of advice on proper form and approach before a competition.
I got a lot of value from that and would happily give my time and money to a brand that does the same for other things I enjoy
Do you have any sources to back up this claim?
These seem very poorly targeted towards me. Does everyone see only this? Are there ways to get into different/better advertising buckets? Even something like "GQ" would be far better than the "People" content I'm currently seeing.
On Instagram the ads are targeted at things I would actually click through and buy -- lots of ads for shoes, bags, clothing, kickstarter-like items, etc.
I assume that's via the hashtags and people I follow on Instagram: cars, travel, architecture, etc. + perhaps via some creepy FaceBook magic.
Without hashtags, how does Snapchat figure out what "Publishers" I'd want to see?
Hold down on a publisher story to get options.
Snapchat's targeting is deliberately vague (based on the presumed anonymity of the service) - which can be ok for brand-awareness campaigns, but bad for conversion campaigns, hence why you see it more tailored to puff-piece content over and above specific ecommerce.
Seemed like an interesting tool, but a harder one for SMEs to sign off on compared to IG/FB/Google.
Why would you want their ads targeted towards you? That means Snapchat would need to capture and analyze your information at the risk of your privacy. I'm totally fine with Kylie Jenner ads as long if it means my privacy is respected.
I'm not looking for targeted ads on Snapchat, but am looking to replicate that Instagram model of following non-IRL people/things that I like. I thought that's what the entire right Publishers tab was for, but (until today's update) I was only getting Kardashians there and had seemingly no way to promote anything else.
Or maybe I'm using Snapchat wrong.
https://hbr.org/2003/03/for-the-last-time-stock-options-are-...
reason is, the "loss" isn't cash outflow, it's from compensation by creating stock, which investors pay for via dilution.
A billion dollars isn't an amount of wealth that has any real meaning to my brain compared to things that happen in my life. On the other hand, I have a very real and personal understanding of about how much a house is worth. From that, it's reasonable to get a gut understanding of an amount of cost by imagining houses being destroyed at a certain pace.
I like these comparisons because I can see them, and marvel at the sheer bigness of them.
Snap is the only innovative social media website right now. Let's see how they do in future
But that's exactly why it works so well for small groups and close friends.
I suppose it's a good thing; they're not wasting any of those views on people like me...
Like it or not, this is how FB bootstrapped their ads business (acai berry anyone?), and Snap is smart to capture the long tail of self-serve advertisers.
Just curious, what did you think they were doing wrong and needed to fix?