Not sure why you would invest in Snap at their IPO price at $17, given that they had no prospect of profitability or any signal of growth due to Instagram's aggressive copying strategy at the time.
Compared to three years ago, $10 is a bargin, but no better than the $5 price in early 2019. Better wait for it to enter single digits.
ALso, 500M is a lot of money but it's not THAT much money when you're running a multi-billion dollar company and responsible for delivering billions in revenue. To get those numbers you have to invest in things. NBC isn't sitting around wondering if they can eek out another million dollars of ad buys for the TODAY show this quarter.
There is some overlap between it and Snapchat for short-form media.
If they had perfect knowledge of the future...
That's typical of social media companies - get users first, and figure out the money later. And it makes sense. If you have a billion active users on your platform, you can always find ways to make money.
>due to Instagram's aggressive copying strategy at the time.
Everyone copies everyone in this space and always has.