Snapchat’s product is booming
bigtechnology.substack.com
bigtechnology.substack.com
As far back as 2014, I remember there being a huge ecosystem of "premium" snaps (sometimes known as "prem(ium) girls"), whereby you would pay the account owner a one time or recurring fee for access to a "premium" snapchat account where the owner posts nudes/etc, essentially OnlyFans-like content. Owner would typically accept payment through any number of ways (paypal/cashapp being most common), and "customer" would provide proof of payment by sending screenshot of receipt that the owner then confirms.
The premium account owner would also typically have a free/open account where they would post free content / teasers/etc, essentially marketing/advertising for their premium account. They would sometimes also market their account on Twitter and Reddit and especially Tinder (and one less popular app by the name of Whisper), much like OnlyFans content creators do today.
As far as I know, this preceded the popularity of OnlyFans and remains a popular use case for Snapchat. I don't use Snapchat much myself nowadays, but I used to be a customer of many of these premium snaps years ago. When I do log in once in a while, many of these accounts are still active, though some are also advertising their OnlyFans.
I think Snap officially bans this practice, but by nature these accounts are private and the owner adds users on a one by one basis, so I don't imagine they get reported a whole lot.
The fact that the content is ephemeral surely helps and is probably one of the main reasons the content creators choose Snap as their platform. Snap also tells you when users screenshot your content, which would often result in getting banned from the premium Snap. Unlike OnlyFans, which cannot get in the AppStore and is relegated to being web-only, Snapchat is mobile-only, making it harder for users to download the content, which is another appeal for these "premium" content creators.
You can't monetise content so all people do is promote their OnlyFans pages.
And Reddit has a lot of content that is city/region specific that most people would never see.
Yeah It just disspeared out my life. Pretty sure its for youngens now. But, I did see it moving in a weird direction before deleting my account
I'm kind of sad at your scenario, though. Receiving pictures from someone I actually got to meet and go on dates with was quite a bit more personal and fulfilling than subscribing to a mass semi-public feed from a professional adult performer. Pros always have to ruin everything.
Basically, people are lonely and will pay to feel seen, heard, or loved.
The reason I would pay for OnlyFans content, if I could afford it, is that there are specific creators on there that I find particularly attractive, either physically or personality-wise, and I would love to help fund their lifestyle.
It seems near an impossibility.
From a product perspective it would be possible, tho it’d be playing with fire. Very different when young people see adult content and you ban it vs they see the adult content you condone but you didn’t intend them to reach. (And they will try to).
But from the perception perspective, even harder. When adults (some parents) see snap as an adult entertainment product, they are not going to want kids using it. Even if there’s some suitable product barrier between the audiences.
Kids are going to be exposed anyway but better to have exposure at a time where theyhave the maturity to handle it.
Education takes time and is hard. It is very nice as parent to know that my kids have some relatively safe social apps.
You're pretty much guaranteed to see unsolicited prn in sc these days. Just create a fresh account and wait for the random friend requests.
The Internet.
Printed media.
But to your point, google, ddg & reddit are examples that enable both adult and non-adult content to co-exist.
Reddit being a better example of a product that’s targeted to a younger demographic, tho far from exclusively.
Before going public they wouldn't have been able to pass it by VCs already invested or raise any more capital. OnlyFans has this problem.
Even if they had offered it early they would have struggled the same way OnlyFans did recently over payments, and with no way to police it on their technology probably would have been embattled with media and public perception way worse.
Banks, investors and other companies don't want to deal with Pornography and sex workers despite the massive proliferation online.
They wouldn't have been able to have all their partnerships, generate revenue from other sources or have apps either.
The top suggested channels were about 80% porn.
The avatars of the people there did not look over 18.
Older people just ruin social media platforms.
Not really.
The best parts of Twitter are amongst professional circles where people use their real names and can provide unique insight into topics that you would never get anywhere else. For example all of the open source intelligence with Ukraine or learning about the intricacies of Brexit from actual trade negotiators.
Whereas if you look at Reddit right now it is inundated with posts about the Depp/Heard case. And there is a visceral hatred towards Heard which is being driven by socially awkward, young men who are self-radicalising. It's really scary to watch.
Real names don't mean anything. Facebook/Twitter/Instagram have people with real names and there's still disgusting behavior and rude interactions. Real names don't mean anything when you're reduced from a person to pixels on a screen, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles.
Reddit provides solace in that people can have more longform, nuanced discussions under an anonymous handle. So they don't have random people scouring through every post of theirs and pulling words out of context, like some witchhunters are doing with old emails.
"Whereas if you look at Reddit right now it is inundated with posts about the Depp/Heard case."
There wouldn't be much to discuss if the case were being handled fairly.
Instead, you've got one party on tape actually admitting abuse of their partner, and yet the victim is the one who loses their career and has magazines printing lies about them. I want you to envision the public reaction to the case if the genders were reversed here.
Any reasonable person can see that this situation is a clear example of unfair double standards, which is why it's being discussed so much. There are double standards for men and women, and I'd wager nearly every man alive right now knows about the double standards men face. That is why reddit, a male-dominated space, is highly interested in this case. This doesn't mean that women don't face double standards, of course, but reddit is not really able to discuss that well.
You think?
Well that was fast, though with 1B MAU, there almost have to be older people on it.
Truthfully, whenever I open Instagram or TikTok it's almost entirely thirst-traps in my timeline. But maybe that's just how the algorithm has been trained for me.
Here are all the TikToks I’ve saved: https://imgur.com/a/YuxWObp
The most interesting part is that “educational” outnumbers “lol” by about 5 to 4. I learn a lot on TikTok — more than Twitter. Of course, HN is still #1 for that (especially for depth) but production quality has been ramping up. TikTok recently emailed 10 minute videos, and it’s a matter of time till they do creator partnerships.
The effect is pretty magical. I recently filmed TikTok converting my 70yo parents into users within 5min: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1515056484668870659?s=2...
To get good algorithm recommendations, you have to use the “not interested” button. (Long press on a video.)
Despite ideas that at college you're supposed to meet people different to you, my college experience mainly consisted of me finding "my people" i.e. tech-obsessed nerds who use Reddit, Hacker News, IRC, Signal, and Discord. And that bubble only got more bubbly when I got internships and jobs at tech companies.
I don't want to project too hard, but it's easy to see how a site like HN could attract lots of people like that who don't engage with Snapchat regardless of age.
TikTok, though, seems to be popular.
Literally everyone has snapchat and most people use it on a daily basis. I do think they provide the overall best group chat experience out of any app, you can just send text if you want, but also save funny pictures or video that people send. And only the good stuff gets saved, so you're usually not dealing with a bunch of clutter and random irrelevant content in the chat's history. The private stories are cool too, but I personally don't use them.
Protip: for those not looking for their own friends specifically, you can/could use snapmaps without a snapchat account, just in your browser and see the feed of whats happening in the heatmap.
Instead of a feed of stories in an order being able to see thumbnails of stories over a map and clicking around the map would be far more engaging for me.
It would also help me alot as a digital nomad/traveller as it would very quickly let me know which friends are in which cities/countries, as opposed to just the same street as others have suggested.
Similarly if you want to know what XXX bar or street is like right now you could see public stories from there.
Just landed in a city? Browse the Instagram map to get an idea which streets are party to visit/avoid or see random pics of food and think fuck let's go there.
I wonder if this is possible via the API?
HOWEVER- their “discover” pane is full of the most repugnant, degenerate, or otherwise braindead bullshit I have ever seen in my life. If I could pay to turn it off permanently they could command a significant sum for me.
My 20yo son in college still uses Snap, and I just checked and apparently he still has 3 streaks that are at 1500 days(ish). That's 4+ years of daily Snapping.
Snap has apparently become a vital part of dating. Tinder to discover and Snap to chat. That makes sense to a generation used to not having their conversations and selfie messages permanently logged.
There's some serious Sugar Baby and OnlyFan action going on as well via Snap. The only time I, as a 50yo, on Tinder get a girl's Snap is when she wants to sell nude pics or talk about an "arrangement".
(This is an entirely different topic, but the Zoomers are first generation to grow up with easy 24/7 access to hardcore porn, and I think it has definitely given them different ideas of relationships and sex than previous generations, and I think we haven't even begun to see the long term effects of this. 19yos talking about ENM? Or BDSM preferences? Craziness.)
Snap is an amusing generational thing because if I hadn't seen my son using it every day for years, I totally would have dismissed it. It's just an app that I have no use for. No history? I have a horrible memory! That's a nightmare app to me.
That's all, just thought I'd share. If you're my age and don't get Snap? That's understandable, just don't dismiss it. To the Zoomers it's part of daily life.
If you compare Evan Spiegel to Kevin Systrom (Instagram founder), Spiegel is 6 times richer and he didn't have to kowtow to Zuckerberg for all those years. Hopefully that's a lesson to founders to go for it, build something real and don't sell out.
A) Be worth $6.6bn and have control of your company, with people generally crediting the company's success with your leadership
or
B) Be worth $1.6bn and have your (former) company be a division of Zuck's empire that's technically worth 3-5x more to shareholders, but (as you just demonstrated) people generally say that it would be worth far less if Facebook hadn't acquired it?
I think Kevin Systrom probably doesn't give a shit about how much Instagram contributes to Meta's market cap these days, but I imagine that he _does_ care about the impact of Instagram on global culture. At the $1bn+ level, it's all about power and legacy. Evan Spiegel has retained the power to shape his legacy.
* The second comment suggests that this vindication is debatable based on Instagram’s valuation being higher than Snapchat’s
* I agree with the first comment and disagree with the second comment, so the point I am trying to make is that it the decision to turn down the acquisition was indeed vindicated.
The problem is that nowadays people mix Direct Marketing with Advertising.
Direct Marketing is where there's a need to track. Advertising is about attention, so if Snapchat has the attention of an audience, that alone is extremely valuable for advertising.
Not sure how the culture is right now however.
I much prefer social media where you explicitly choose who to send things to. It feels way more personal than the usual model where you post to your whole network on some public feed. I enjoyed taking a picture/video of something interesting, then quickly choosing which friends would find it amusing. It felt like I was saying, "I think that YOU will like this!" rather than "SOMEONE will like this". And if the recipient wanted to reply, that conversation was one-on-one and more personal.
There were other perks too: taking/sending snaps was pretty quick, their ephemeral nature lowered the bar of what you'd send (in a good way), the filters could were fun, and recipients could review snaps at their leisure.
Sadly only one or two of my friends are still active on it.
I personally see these numbers and assume half are bots or controlled marketing accounts to boost viewers or spam comments. Just going off personal experience using these sort of apps.
Snapchat is more amenable to having a "persona". If you make an second account on Instagram, Instagram will literally start recommending it to the followers of your main account.
So Snapchat just allows for a use case that Instagram simply does not. Instagram is the new Facebook. They are not friendly to being anonymous or pseudonymous.
A lot of people on this thread are saying that people are doubting Snapchat’s numbers because they are old. And that’s definitely part of it.
But, it’s also all the other metrics that don’t add up. The extremely low revenue per user, for example. Even lower than Twitter, for example, which has very high global penetration (therefore most of their users are from places with much lower costs of living than the US and therefore don’t generate as much as revenue), and has users spread across lower value platforms like the web, as opposed to Snapchat’s app only interface.
On a personal level, I know someone whose business placed a bunch of ads in different social media (clothing primarily aimed at college aged women, but with a customer base that ranges from teens to late 20s) and had remarkably low engagement on Snapchat.
And all of this is despite Apple signal boosting Snapchat for several events in a row now.
In fact, I found the answer to your question on the 4th page of their annual filing to shareholders[1]:
> While these metrics are determined based on what we believe to be reasonable estimates of our user base for the applicable period of measurement, there are inherent challenges in measuring how our products are used across large populations globally. For example, there may be individuals who have unauthorized or multiple Snapchat accounts, even though we forbid that in our Terms of Service and implement measures to detect and suppress that behavior. We have not determined the number of such multiple accounts.
It seems to me that Snap is quite open about their active user counts.
Weird. If a person is not a bot, you'd expect that when they are making an nth account they are attempting to apply another use case for the service in their life. More time in app.
I'd also expect there are fewer incentives for creating bots on snap versus other platforms. Its a messaging app, people only use it with people they know.
No. In my experience, it's because they lost access to the older account for whatever reason. Accounts are cheap and ephemeral and forgot password flows are horrible.
> iPhone farm to generate security tokens to access @Snapchat private APIs
(back in 2016)
Maybe it's just me but in general, I use snap in a way that's pretty different to any other social media. I don't use it a lot anymore though, and it's still hard to explain that "difference" honestly
My wife installed it on her phone, and likewise when we have met other families the kids have done the same. It's not used for any messaging element, just purely as a digital novelty for the kids to pass 15 - 20 minutes while we wait for food.
One random occasion led to about 6 families with 7-10 year old kids downloading and using the novelty aspects of the app. I expect the same ripple effect has happened with other children in each of their networks.
FB has almost cloned Snap's features into Messenger and Insta. So, do you think - Snap's UX is still far better?
And their primary audience of teenagers to young adults eats that up. Hell, it being baffling to "old people" was half the appeal.
I remember using it about 10 years ago in highschool, and then college, before I kind of went to nothing and then instagram to keep in touch with some people. I'm 26 now and I know a lot of people that still use it. But unlike facebook/instagram, I don't really know of any people much older than me that started using snapchat.
Big difference between this audience and how I (an old) experience the internet.
Up to Facebook (including IG):
- share things on the internet
After Facebook:
- do things _on_ the internet, in real or near-real time
- do things _for_ the internet
I’m not personally drawn to the post-Facebook experience but I see it as a rather natural progression. The novelty will probably wear off fast, but they keep making teenagers and there are probably few other places your old friends are bound to be.
And once you realize Snap allows you to carry on with that ephemeral experience even when you aren't near, you realize why it does so well.
Wait, what? I thought Gen Y was the placeholder name until Millennial stuck.
greatest, lost, boomer, gen X, millennial, gen Z
Facebook did wise in making messenger it’s own app and opening up for an alternative with more intimate sharing.
Adopting stories was a great business move although it seems to be mostly instagram that has story adoption, which ironically is the platform that is most about broadcasting of all of metas platforms.
IRC, ICQ/AIM, Y!M, MSN, Skype would all beg to differ.
Chat is more fun using Snap!
Good to see they are still thriving though. Compared to Instagram they have maintained to be an app solely to communicate with friends vs. Instagram's philosophy of a feed of edited photos that can cause you to compare yourself to others.
This holds lessons for the people who want free speech in social media. There are at least 10 social media apps/sites that say they practice what Elon Musk says should be the norm: Anything legal is allowable speech on social media.
And yet i do not see anyone pouring in the same levels of capital that Snapchat and some other newer entrants got. Why not? What is preventing first tier investors from backing these platforms? Why have several of them failed outright? What could turn that around?
Are there any serious social networks who overtly advertise as anti-free speech? Making speech the hook when the site looks like a third-rate ripoff of Twitter isn't a winning strategy.
I've never used Snap so forgive any ignorance on my part.
Texting is not nearly as engaging. So much of communication is visual and tone. Emojis can only go so far
Outside of the US I mostly use WhatsApp, I suspect if that (or Signal) was more widely used in the US Snapchat would be less popular.
It's quite a difference, but isn't surprising to see and may also explain the rise in users, given the unlikelihood of millions of bots ruining and inflating the usage numbers.
But once again as I predicted, it is far from dying, [0] or even going to allow itself to getting acquired. [1]. In fact, they are the ones continuing to acquire more companies.
ehhhhhh.... there are LOTTSSS of bots on snapchat. especially if you ever add a pretty person's snap from their dating profile.
How old are you?
No one I know uses it, but that makes sense to me. I'm internet-old now.
Weirdly enough I have an interview with Snap in a few weeks as well. Despite the drop that tech stocks have seen everywhere the last year or so I think it's still a strong company to try and join.
I use it a couple of times a day and have done for years. Primarily to keep up with close and loose friends from high school ect. Pictures from friends everyday life that are not necessarily meant to provoke a response still keep you in the loop and not drift apart.
My observation is that that IG is more popular with urban, liberal, artistic (people create and/or sell art), style-oriented, older audience. It feels more professional and public, and it's common to follow accounts like celebs, artists, businesses, or generally people you haven't met in person. Artistic and lifestyle people will use IG chat to communicate and connect. For example a yoga studio or music venue may post events there. It feels like it's taking the role of a more image-oriented facebook. The stories are very popular too.
Snapchat is (in my observation) more popular with midwestern/rural/suburban people, and the network is more friends of friends or maybe people you met at parties. It's much more casual and it's more likely you have met the people you connect with. Trendy urban people I have met have shunned it for a while and think it's childish, but some are coming back. Either way it's the primary way I communicate with certain contacts besides imessage/sms (mainly through the chat). I'll post something to a story and someone will comment on it or vice versa.
Anecdotally snapchat was very popular in high school and early college and then waned, but became more popular again recently for some reason (I'm getting more and more views on my stories than before even though I'm not adding friends that frequently). Also when I talk to foreigners, they see it as a childish thing that was a fad in the 2010s, but people in the US (especially suburban types) are very active on it and have been for a while.
I'm bullish on snapchat and it's my largest "fun"/risk investment in a single company because of the stickiness it has with people my age and younger, specifically in a more midwestern rural/suburban demographic. Also the snapmap feature is phenomenal and will be the next thing other tech companies start imitating.
Their metrics all suggest an inflated user count.
Source: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001564408/000156459...
These strategies have been employed by other competitors as aggressive as well though. So it is probably still comparable. I would say Snapchat's metrics are more "authentic" a few years ago, but now it is more "comparable".
Evidence?
This is a laughably poor attempt at astroturfed buzz generation.
That's all very anecdotal, and so is my next point: I get a new bot or porn spam account adding me once or twice a week, some of which have large karma counts indicating they've been around for a while.
So yes all of that is anecdotal but I suspect the bots I'm seeing are just the tip of the iceberg of what is actually making up the growing userbase of the app. Most of the young'ns appear to be on tiktok these days anyways.
Anecdotes are not evidence. Is this what it has come to just to make a 'point'?
> So yes all of that is anecdotal but I suspect the bots I'm seeing are just the tip of the iceberg of what is actually making up the growing userbase of the app. Most of the young'ns appear to be on tiktok these days anyways.
Some social networks have more bots than others. Especially more bots if the product is available as a web page unlike an app-based product which the barrier is higher. Given the security there, I doubt that there are millions of bots actively posing as users on Snapchat, verses the ones anyone encounters on Twitter, TikTok and Instagram.
The kids these days are also certainly using TikTok, but clearly that has been banned in some countries. Take India for example, which Snapchat seems to be thriving there. [0]
Regardless, I don't like or use either of these products since they are both essentially digital addictive drugs companies manipulating people on what is seen and unseen on their platforms. But I don't see how 'anecdotes' from anyone here hold true when the numbers from the earnings say otherwise. [1][2]
[0] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/snap-hi...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/20/snap-reaches-500-million-mon...
[2] https://ca.movies.yahoo.com/snapchat-growing-faster-facebook...
I have Instagram, TikTok, and the rest, but Snap is truly and unironically my favorite social media platform out there - bar none.
The “disappearing-as-default” messaging, filters, snap map make it a fun, casual messaging app.
The lack of public profiles, of “likes”, of “discoverability” makes the app feel genuine. Few people are trying to be “Snapchat influencers.”
It’s just nice (esp. in comparison to Meta’s platforms) and I wish more people felt that way.
Every dating app is filled with sex workers and bots that act like them, advertising their snapchat username in their profiles 24/7 next to "I'm not on here much use my snap". People check it out whether they really interact with the broader platform or not.
It doesn't really matter what you think your friends do socially, when people are hopping on when bored or on the toilet or before going to bed or when horny or lonely.