Yahoo Close to Investing in Snapchat at $10B Value | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo Close to Investing in Snapchat at $10B Value

bloomberg.com

28 pointscoreymgilmore43 comments

Snapchat must be huge in the teen/young adult demographic to justify this valuation as I don't see many adults using this app anymore. Although this is a fairly localized/anecdotal opinion of the app, perhaps in other regions, Snapchat is big among many demographic categories.

I am a 23 year old at a large state school and I can tell you that snapchat is definitely the most popular social media app on campus.

It has completely replaced texting for a lot of my peers and in my opinion is best way to flirt electronically. Twitter and instagram are tied for second, with Facebook coming in last.

For what its worth, meeting someone who isn't on snapchat is unheard of, but I haven't added anyone on facebook since the fall term began.

Yik Yak is also on the rise but it's anonymous nature limits connections, and in turn growth.

I feel like Facebook is flaming out. Do you get that sense too?

Yes. I used to think that facebook would still keep getting life events/friend checkups. But my friends have slowly been moving that to snapchat.

Just get married, snapchat that wedding ring (then post to facebook later a status update).

I still use facebook for events/groups. But I can see someone stealing that away from them.

I think Facebook is becoming a virtual contact list and birthday reminder, with status updates and pictures acting like mini holiday cards for events that are noteworthy but not significant enough to actually send out a card for(getting into grad school/new job).

Pretty much everyone is on Facebook under their real name, and it is the only social media platform where that is the case. The management consultant in me has a feeling that data is going to be worth a lot of money.

Google might know a lot about my interests but Facebook has my real name, real school, real job, as well as my interests.

Maybe, however for me, I haven't found anything that has replaced full albums of events (vacation, wedding, new baby). Or atleast haven't found anything that has had enough adoption to justify me leaving FB.

Even though there's a lot of users on Yik Yak, I feel like snapchat doesn't follow the 1% rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%2...).

On yik yak their's a lot of lookers, but few posters. On Snapchat everyone is creating/viewing content. Its become the replacement to texting. Shall I dare say its the whatsapp of American 18-25 year olds.

Oh, it's definitely huge in that demographic (I'm in it). My only question is for how long. My peers are a fickle bunch.

Reading things like this kinda depresses me. I guess I just don't understand what makes things popular on the web. I mean, I would have never thought things like Twitter, Instagram, all of the various messaging apps would ever get this much traction. I think it's bizarre.

The mistake here is that you are conflating your subjective preference with reality. You are implicitly evaluating something against your own context, but to understand why twitter,etc are successful, you need to ask questions about what OTHER people value, and why they do it.

You say that, but it is the same as the dotcom days, everyone thought it was a "new economy", yadda yadda. Right now, ALL these investments are highly speculative. Any of these companies could do a MySpace overnight.

Very much agreed. But think about it - even Myspace was only sold for a little over half a billion. We are orders of magnitude higher now. Holy bubble!

It's worth noting that most popular web apps today started out as related but different ideas, and it wasn't always a result of some clear-cut vision. Twitter for example was a group SMS service and there was a lot of uncertainty about its actual purpose and utility, even among the founding team:

>>"With Twitter, it wasn't clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn't replace anything. There was this path of discovery with something like that, where over time you figure out what it is. Twitter actually changed from what we thought it was in the beginning, which we described as status updates and a social utility. It is that, in part, but the insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network." -Evan Williams

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#History

switching cost for the users on all these platforms is essentially nothing, which would scare me off as an investor

Network effects can be significant. When I want to send out an event invite I use Facebook, not because I think it's better, but because it is what my friends use.

And snapchat plans to make money how?

Plus, at least in europe kik and viber seem a lot more popular than snapchat. And it would take them about an afternoon to add a "self destruct" checkbox to their image and video dialogs...

I can understand yahoo desperately wanting to get a foot down "with the cool kids". But 10 billion, seriously?

Shared revenue of sponsored story promotions/snaps would be one way. Think of this:

Create a marketplace around big businesses getting viral content producers to push their products subtly (Truman Show anyone?). Snapchat, acting as the intermediary and service provider, can collect a percentage of the promotional gig in return for facilitating the transaction and acting as an escrow service or middleman. It's not so different from television ads now, just a broader market with lots more content producers that have large fanbases across demographics TV just doesn't have.

Snapchat already has "promoted snaps" of a kind, I suspect they'd just continue down that path.

>Users send more than 700 million disappearing “snaps” a day and more than 500 million stories viewed daily

well, in Internet dollars - $100/user of FB and the likes - 70M users is $7B scale. 500M exposures point to the same ballpark - the ballpark where it doesn't really matter whether it is $5B or $10B valuation. Even 10 fold growth would bring Yahoo only $200M - peanuts, and obviously Yahoo makes that investment not for money, it is just a cover fee for entry into the club.

It's not clear how much Yahoo is investing at that valuation, but I hope that the stated reason of re-creating an Alibaba type investment is not the primary driver. Despite the success of Alibaba, a single data point is not a trend (even a spectacular one like Alibaba), and I'm not sure that Yahoo's core competency is/should be picking winners.

I fear that Yahoo has little faith in its long-term vision and is placing it in another company. Although there is nothing wrong with this action directly, it does show that their capital is more useful somewhere else rather than within their own company for a similar vertical.

Other reports have said it's in the ballpark of $20M.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/yahoo-nears-investment-in-sna...

Which is peanuts to Yahoo. This basically seems like they're trying to emulate Google Ventures without the full commitment of creating an organization like that. Seems smart.

Amazing for a company that is primarily about a user base they can't charge for, or data mine for advertising.

Between Tinder and now Snapchat, it makes me think Yahoo is building a p0rn empire.

I think that's a bit ridiculous to say. Based on that comment, it sounds like you've never used Tinder or Snapchat. There are many users on Tinder who are looking for relationships, and users of Snapchat like to share their moments with each other without having to save the bad quality photos on their phone.

Has Yahoo invested in Tinder? Can't find mention of it anywhere.

They probably meant to write Tumblr, which Yahoo does own.

I thought Match.com owns Tinder now?

By that logic, I'd say that we could look at the reddit investment as a pornography investment, too.

The investment will, however, disappear after being deposited.

How do you monetize a large user base without credit cards? How would they get teens to get their parents to pay for the ability to send nude pics to their friends?

Meanwhile, millions of small businesses paying $10 a month for secure document shredding with years of increasing profit remains large ignored by the media, nobody bats an eye. Nobody puts an insane valuation on it because it's not cool. So business is no longer about positive net cash flows but spending it. Whoever spends money in the coolest way is the winner as long as you got investors who suddenly forgot what happened the last time we were in the new and hip economy.

I would be insanely grateful to fly under the radar like that, were I the owner of a business that had millions of paying customers. Let the media crow about Snapchat all they want, and dry your tears on hundred dollar bills.

The majority of ad $ spend has been in TV. It's not because there was a credit card reader on each TV, but because there was not a better way to get that kind of wide exposure. There is tons of money transitioning from TV to other areas.

  How do you monetize a large user base without credit cards?

Ask Facebook. With Snapchat's curated "Our Story" stream it would be easy for them to superimpose a brand's logo on top of snaps that would get viewed by an audience that fits a particular demographic. I'd wager that companies see value in that.

I'd agree with that. You have to have a market's attention before the sell -- whatever that may be -- and Snapchat has that right now. I think this particularly applies to younger markets. For example, when I was a kid cartoons were basically 30 minute advertisements for toys and games. And you had better believe I let my parents know those toys were must haves. Snapchat might be in the best position to be that platform for the teenage market, a new MTV if you will.

Yeah it would be like subliminal messaging, like they used to do in cinemas. Remind me why they stopped?

They didn't stop. The industry term of art these days is "embedded advertising" and it's used in television and movies far more than you would think. Hear a character mention a current brand name seemingly off-hand? Yeah, not an accident.

Sure, that's product placement, and it is very hard to do well. Remember the Cisco placement in CSI, or Omega in Casino Royale? Utterly cringeworthy.

Subliminal messaging is flashing something up too quickly to consciously register, but still leaving an impression.

It's actually beyond product placement. It's about getting something in the story line that triggers brand awareness. This doesn't even mean showing or mentioning the product directly. I know several screenwriters who have their work subjected to this kind of editing. It is utterly subliminal and not at all similar to the popular culture version of "subliminal messaging" that you refer to.

On the subject of James Bond there's another scene in the same film where he's using a Sony Ericcson phone. Really, the suavest man in the world rocks a Sony phone? It's embarrassing to watch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com