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.
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
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.
> iPhone farm to generate security tokens to access @Snapchat private APIs
(back in 2016)
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.
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.