Evan Spiegel Reveals Plan to Turn Snapchat into a Real Business

Let's see what you're done.

Snapchat has done well thus far not to alienate users while introducing features that allow brands to get their content in front of users (discover). Particularly difficult considering it's mostly a private network on which you share with friends. They haven't any huge privacy scandals yet either - at least none that have had an effect on usage.

It may seem like just another dumb app to a lot of people here and honestly I thought the same for a while. My generation took quite a while to start using it but now it's something we use a lot. It's great for sharing pictures you don't need around forever on Facebook. Photos of nights out, as they happen for people who can't be there. Candid snaps on holidays and trips. I don't see it replacing Facebook for anyone but it seems to coexist nicely.

Most of the negativity here is actually quite familiar. It's the same crap people spewed about Facebook for the last 6 years or so. Any none of it has really come true.

Sorry for the rant.

Completely delusional.

I don't know what SnapChat will end up "being", but the idea that the worst-case-scenario is, for all intents and purposes, "incredibly successful" is so far off the rails. How people can read things like this without at least contemplating a tech bubble is beyond me.

For lack of a better analogy, I think that young Americans with smartphones have embraced a sort of unix philosophy with regards to their social networking, which is to say, they want a service that does one thing and does it well.

They have linkedin profiles for humblebragging about their long term professional life. They have facebook for humblebragging about their long term personal aspirations and achievements. They have twitter for sharing unnoteworthy small thoughts. They have instagram for sharing noteworthy moments that aren't necessarily major life events, and they have snapchat for showing what they're doing right now.

They really don't want something that merges these in any way. The reason being, for any given user publishing content on any of these networks, they all are publishing to different audiences. I want my parents to see my linkedin and to see my facebook. I don't want them to see my twitter necessarily. I don't want them to see my snapchat. (FWIW, in reality I don't have facebook, twitter, linkedin, or snapchat, but this is just an example of how 18-24 y/os think.)

Google had a fix for the issue of audience with g+ and circles, but they fell short on implementation, I think. There weren't enough different ways to share content and shape your profile, pretty much just posts. If they had made better ways to publish temporary posts, static info (like resume and work experience), and to organize views of the site by circles rather than merging them all together, I think they'd have succeeded.

The idea that snapchat can pivot to be anything other than an extension on MMS is ridiculous to me. (It doesn't even do that now, by the way. No group snapchats. The stupid filters like speed you're traveling and the current time look absolutely terrible.)

I think users of snapchat like it for what it is, quick pictures shared to a few people that you think might enjoy it. Nothing you want permanently on the web. Maybe it can become something like periscope or meerkat. I think there's also a market for advertising in the 'featured stories' part of the app, and from the article, it sounds like where they're headed.

But their moves like snapcash, and any aspirations that are separate from sharing temporary moments? Completely bewildering to me. I fear they're trying to become something their users don't want snapchat to be.

One thing I will say, Spiegel seems like a really cool guy with a heart in the right place and is probably a genius. I will not be surprised to see him completely prove me wrong.

“Evan views advertising as a product, while most Internet founders view advertising as a necessary evil.”

Snapchat may have overestimated the pull it has with advertisers. It started its program by charging about $100 per 1,000 views, or more than $750,000 for a day-long campaign, more than double the rates of YouTube or Hulu. Other companies have balked at ponying up for ads on a service that still lacks some of the basic targeting and measurement tools now standard in digital advertising.

This month the company announced it would start to charge $20 per 1,000 views. The company declined to say where prices started.

They aren't going to be "the next generation Viacom", but they are truly going to disrupt the entertainnment industry.

Advertising is something necessary in the capitalist system, advertising won't disappear anytime soon. The aggregate value comes when it's blended to the UX through smoother mechanisms. That's Snapchat's philosophy and a lot of other companies will opt for that philosophy as well.

Also, the explanation for why they don't label buttons is "it's something new"? And that engineers are busy making new products? Is this bad editing or reading comprehension, or ?

Let me guess: showing ads?

If advertising was banned, 99% of the web would lose its "business model" overnight...

...but the rest would be actual businesses with actual customers paying for their products.

There's a life cycle for social networks:

- New cool thing, but no monetization. - Big growth. - Ads and spyware added. - Growth slows. - More ads added to boost revenue. - Growth stops. - More ads, more tracking. - Users leave. - Collapse.

AOL, Geocities, Orkut, and Myspace have already completed their life cycle. Facebook and Twitter are at "More ads added to boost revenue", and entering the "growth stops" phase.

(Focusing on cool can backfire. Coca-Cola has that problem. While frantically advertising and changing their packaging, their product quality has dropped. They once worked hard to get expired product out of stores and checked drink dispensers for over-diluting their product. They don't bother any more, and their products taste like crap about half the time.)

Cool app, though. Lots of fun. Snapchat's basically replaced texting for the average-to-cooler kids at my high school. It used to be that the "cool kids" would have unlimited texting, but now they just use Snapchat. I wonder what they'll come up with next.

tl;dr: Evan Spiegel stole an idea for disappearing photos from a frat brother and hit the viral lottery with it. He now hopes to monetize without alienating his large and fickle userbase, but advertisers are thus far unimpressed with the results.

But come on, are all these "startups" only capable of being yet another ad platform? Whatsapp was revolutionary as they had no ads and actually made money by, gasp, charging the users for an excellent service (at a very reasonable price).

He's not "secretive". He doesn't have one. His plan (or lack of) was to get as many people using the app as possible and then scramble to try to monetize it.

The issue, like every other person with a company like this, is that if there is even a hint of commercialization, the users will jump to the next "cool" thing.

Reddit is having the same problem. The original founders were lucky in that it was bought out and they got their payout.

The next thing is already here.