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For investors, controversy is seen as meaningless (and sometimes as a good thing) unless it's hurting the business. In the case of Snapchat, it hasn't. As for making money, one shouldn't judge their ability to do so based on how the product looks today. More than half of Facebook's revenue now comes from mobile, a product that they only perfected a year ago.

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It seems like Facebook had a relatively clear path with already having the news feed. Keeping users on a single page absorbing information with ads intermingled unobtrusively, but with Snapchat I'm in any of three views for just a few moments before I close the app again; all that to say, I just don't think it's a very good comparison.

That's the point I was making. As it is now, it's hard to see where they would fit in advertising or whatever. It's better to look at the product as a foundation. Having tens of millions of users using your product multiple times a day is a good starting place to build on.

So apparently a mere starting place, which may or may not yield any actual profit (in an unspecified amount) via an unspecified method at an unspecified date in the future, is worth $10,000,000,000, about four times as much as Google's IPO, keeping in mind that Google had a real profitable business plan at the time?

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